The National Film Archive of India has released Censor Board records of films from the NFAI collection for public access. The records, currently available on NFAI website, consist of data published as Bombay and Bengal government gazettes between 1920 to 1950.
The information available includes: the name of the film that was examined, number of reels, length of the film, name of the person or company applying for certification, name of person or company producing or releasing the film, their country of origin, date of examination, number and date of certificate issued and other endorsement details.
The records are copies from Bengal and Bombay censor board’s registry from 1920-1950. An NFAI official working in the Pune-based office told Silverscreen that NFAI director Prakash Magdum had decided to release the records for the benefit of researchers. NFAI was set up as the independent media unit of Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in 1964, and works for the storage and preservation of films for future use. NFAI recently resumed work on digitising films and assessing film conditions.
A few weeks back, the association faced trouble when a CAG report revealed that over 31,000 reels or cans held by them were lost or destroyed. A test check of records maintained by the director of NFAI Pune between May 1, 2015 and September 30, 2017 revealed information about missing reels. The report, accessed by an applicant under the Right to Information Act, stated that physical verification of NFAI library books was carried out in 2016-17 but no such exercise was carried out for other items such as video cassettes, DVDs, stills, audio CDs, disc records, etc.
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It was also reported that NFAI’s National Film Heritage Mission, set up by the government in 2017 for better preservation methods, was facing space constrains with a delay on sanction of its proposal for a new vault to be built on NFAI premises in Pune. An official was quoted in a Hindustan Times report as saying that the government was yet to clear funds and give permission for pending proposals. “It has been more than a year since a proposal for building a new vault was sent and it has still not been cleared,” said the official.
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