In a decisive push to preserve the history of Uttar Pradesh, each of its erstwhile districts, and to make it more accessible to people, the Akhilesh Yadav government has decided to make district gazetteers available online.
The two-phase digitalising exercise, already underway, will be launched by Yadav, once it is completed. A comprehensive geographical and social encyclopaedia of districts, the gazetteer is a government document that contains information about the history, geography, climate,
culture and trade of different districts.
But now, the rich repository of information is only a click away, a senior state official here said. In UP, the district gazetteers that didn’t crumble to dust over time were housed within the rickety shelves of a government office in lucknow’s Jawahar Bhawan. Some documents, now more than 100 years old,
were dying a slow death.
Even though no new gazetteer has been published in UP since 2001 - the last one being Volume I General and History of the State, and Volume V
Social Services, Culture and Places of Interest - the Samajwadi Party government has decided to give the older dusty racks a new lease of life.
In their revival exercise, the government has already digitalised 56 erstwhile British district of UP and have included gazetteers of undivided UP, including Nainital and Dehradun. The history of district gazetteers in the state goes back to 1803 when the Board of Directors of the East India Company directed its officers to supply to them such information on the ‘chronology, geography, government, laws, political revolutions, the progressive stages of the
arts and sciences, and particularly of the former and present state of internal and foreign trade’, so that they could, on the basis of the information, compile a history of their possessions in India.
In 1872, the Government of India adopted a regular scheme for the preparation of the Imperial Gazetteers. State gazetteers were then compiled for each district. The publication of these was spread over a period of about ten years, starting 1872.
In the case of Avadh, alphabetical gazetteers were prepared in two volumes and were called the Oudh Gazetteers. Going through two sets of
revisions to bring all information up to date, the gazetteers were revised again after independence. In 1959, the gazetteers were
completely re-written, adding details of the districts famous men and women,
including these to the chapter on ‘Education and Culture’. With the passage of time, though, the number of original copies of the old
gazetteers available in the district collectorates, and central and district libraries, began declining. Non-revision of existing copies was an additional problem.