Project Shaurya Sankalan: Digital Archiving of Military History

Utkarsh Classes Last Updated 14-01-2024

Project Shaurya Sankalan: Digital Archiving of Military History

Defence 3 min read

The Indian Army initiated Project 'SHAURYA SANKALAN' to preserve its rich and glorious history as a part of Digital India Vision.

About Project Shaurya Sankalan

The Army wants to save its history for the future. They have archived almost 700 hours of audio-visual content and 11 lakh pages of ‘declassified records’.
The records contain information about significant events. Some examples include the Jammu and Kashmir conflict in 1948, the Goa Liberation in 1961, and the India-Pakistan wars in 1965 and 1971.
More than 11 lakh pages and 700 hours of audio-visual content have been collected.
These records are related to the 1948 Jammu and Kashmir conflict, the 1961 Goa Liberation (Operation Vijay), and the 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan wars.
These records include "after-action reports" and films. They have been digitised and preserved in the 'Digital Archive Kiosk' at the United Services Institute of India in New Delhi.
The collection comes from over 1300 units, formations, regimental centres, and military museums.
The Army War College will have another kiosk at the upcoming 'History Cell'. This kiosk will be accessible to researchers, academicians, and scholar warriors. It will be in an interactive web page format.
- This initiative has given a boost to the digital and comprehensive ecosystem of the Indian Army's history. The ecosystem will continue to be enhanced and enriched in the future.
The digitization process involves scanning documents using advanced overhead scanners. These scanners provide a resolution of 300 dpi for pages and 600 dpi for photos.
During the scanning process, the metadata and keywords of each page are extracted using optical character recognition (OCR) technology. This makes it easy to retrieve the documents using Data Management Software.
The process created a digital repository for all Indian Army documents. Scholars, historians, and academics can now easily access these documents for research.
The National Archives and INTACH helped restore approximately 5000 pages that were old and brittle.

The Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) was founded in 1984 in New Delhi with a vision of being the driving force behind heritage awareness and conservation in India