With North Block being emptied out and South Block in the process of being vacated, the Yuge Yugeen Bharat Museum (YYBM) plan has picked up pace and efforts are on to ready the content and narrative aspect of the project.
The Ministry of Culture has selected New Delhi-based firm EKA for the content part of the museum project, The Indian Express has learnt. This comes weeks after a consortium led by architectural firm ARCOP Associates was selected for design consultancy.
EKA specialises in planning and creating archives, museums and cultural complexes, as per its website. Set up in 2009, Eka Cultural Resources and Research also provides assistance in research, documentation and publication for cultural industries, it says.
It is helmed by co-founder Pramod Kumar KG, who is also the founder-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival and former co-director of Mountain Echoes, the Bhutan Literature Festival. Their clients include Chennai’s Kalakshetra Foundation, City Palace Museums in Udaipur and Jaipur as well as international institutions in Nepal, Bhutan and West Asia.
Over the last couple of weeks, both the design and the content teams have been sitting together along with officials from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs and the Ministry of Culture to work on the overall narrative of the flagship museum, as well as for the adaptive reuse of the heritage buildings that were designed as office spaces, it is learnt. There are about nine members in the content team and an equal number in the design team.
The biggest challenge will be to use not only the rooms of the heritage buildings, which were designed as office spaces almost a century ago, but also their courtyards and corridors so that it becomes a seamless museum experience for visitors. Presently, the teams are engaged in working towards that goal, and the first phase of the museum, dubbed to be the world’s biggest, will be complete in a year’s time, said sources.
As reported by The Indian Express, the first gallery to come up on the ground floor of North Block is tentatively called ‘Time and Timelessness’, and is tipped to showcase around 100 landmark artefacts aiming to explore “Bharat’s civilisational relationship with time”, spanning “centuries of cultural, philosophical, and scientific evolution”. The overarching theme of the museum is 5,000 years of Indian civilisation, with the name signifying its “perennial” nature.
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The retrofitting work of North Block has already started following the shifting of finance, home affairs and personnel ministries over the past few months. Now, with the Prime Minister’s Office set to move into the newly constructed Sewa Tirath complex, the Central Public Works Department has kicked off the conservation and retrofitting of South Block as well. The department invited bids from contractors on October 25 for the “comprehensive conservation, retrofitting and setting up of utility building in South Block” at an estimated cost of `298.52 crore, with a completion period of 24 months. The last date for submission of bids is November 19.
