KARACHI, March 15: The Sindh Archives Department is not legally authorized to make government departments deposit their records on a regular basis. Sources told Dawn on Monday that few government departments bothered to send records to the Sindh Archives Department, which was having a hard time preserving the records and archives it already possessed.

"At least 26 technical posts are vacant at the Sindh Archives Department, with the result that the department does not have a librarian, a classifier, a cataloguer and a bibliographer.

However, the department has trained its non-technical staff on a self-help basis to carry out tasks which otherwise require a great deal of skill, precision and experience," the director of the Sindh Archives Department, Kaleemullah Lashari, told Dawn.

Even so, the Sindh Archives Department has an impressive collection. It has 34,465 files from the office of the Karachi Commission (1818-1935), 1,783 old maps, 17,530 files and cases of the Sindh High Court (19th century), 1,340 books from the Shikarpur library, 350 books from the Jacobabad deputy commissioner, 325,000 pages of G.M. Syed documents, 850 registers of the Karachi district registrar (1866-1949), four volumes of Who's who in the Jacobabad and Larkana districts and 152 files of the Sindh old record from Punjab.

In an arbitrary move, the government transferred the Sindh Archives Department from the control of the Sindh culture department to that of the information department in Dec 2002.

Former Sindh culture secretary Hameed Akhund recalled that his department had moved a summary suggesting that museums, libraries and archives should be governed by one department.

"The transfer of the Sindh archives department from the control of the culture department to that of the information department does not stand to reason. It was done ostensibly at the time of the implementation of the devolution plan under which government departments were either reduced or made more compact," he said.

The Sindh information secretary, Mehtab Akbar Rashdi, observed that there was no rationale behind the decision. She added that this had happened following the regrouping of various Sindh government departments.

"The reason why so many technical posts are vacant at the Sindh Archives Department is that there has been a ban on recruitment for a long time. The department also faces a shortage of funds and equipment. As a result, it cannot perform its function in a way it should," she said.

Mr Lashari pointed out that conservation was an expensive process. "The department has a large number of documents which need to be preserved without delay, but we have succeeded in conserving only 17 per cent of the records that we have. We have also microfilmed 15 per cent of the documents and books that we possess," he said.

The microfilming section of the Sindh Archives Department has 39 rolls of newspapers, five rolls of books, 287 rolls of revenue departments records, 13 rolls of finance department records, 67 rolls of the G.M. Syed library, 57 rolls of the Sindh Adabi Board, 194 rolls of district registrar Karachi and 31 rolls of journals of Royal Asiatic Society.

Mr Lashari said the Sindh Archives Department needed at least Rs1.2 million on a yearly basis to continue microfilming important and rare documents.