The Indian Railways has a vast heritage with 165 years backing the organization. And what more than a story-telling online platform to showcase the heritage.
Indian Railways and Google Arts & Culture have joined hands to launch Rail Heritage Digitization Project.
Minister of Railways and Coal, Piyush Goyal has launched it through video-conferencing. The project can be accessed through the link: https://artsandculture.google.com/project/indian-railways
Goyal said “At the outset, let me congratulate the Indian Railways and the Google Arts and Culture Association for this wonderful initiative, which has taken over two years of hard work, research, inquiry and execution. It is often said that civilisation is built over millennia by countless generations, with each generation leaving its footprints in the sands of time. A culture must reserve these footprints to remember what it was and where it came from. Whenever we look at the evolution of the transport system in India, all these rich traditions, history and culture will play an important role in understanding how the Indian Railways has evolved.
Digitization of rail heritage provides an opportunity to contextualize artifact and other heritage assets with the stories thus becoming more meaningful to the next generation. Digital heritage also removes the bottleneck of being physically there and thus providing universal access to the large repository of knowledge
Being a 165-year-old organisation, the Railways has a lot of material which we need to preserve and leave behind for posterity. The Indian Railways has a lot of treasured moments for the world to see how technologies evolved over time. This partnership between the Railways and Google also has the dimension of the Wi-Fi, which we have proliferated to over 400 stations in India. This shows the potential of collaborations to serve people. The Wi-Fi that has been set up in 711 stations now, have faster Wi-Fi access than any other system in the nation.”
Goyal described the project as the gift from the 13 lakh Railways employees to the 130 crore citizens of India.
Railway Board Chairman Ashwani Lohani, Rajan Anandan (Vice President, South East Asia and India, Google), Amit Sood, Director, Google Cultural Institute were present at the launch event.
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