Major Meetings and Seminars —
EXHIBITION ON “TIMELESS INDIA, RESURGENT INDIA:
A CELEBRATION OF THE LAND AND PEOPLE OF INDIA”

The exhibition is an effort to present the essential features of Indian geography, culture, history and economy. Comprising of about 90 large-format panels, the exhibition is divided in several sections. The first and the largest section offers an overview of the extraordinary natural resources that India commands in the form of land, soil, water, sunshine, vegetation, animals and minerals. The second section offers equally compelling overviews of the civilisational resources available to India in the form of deeply engrained social and cultural values of harmonious living and caring for others, on the one hand, and of highly sophisticated technological skills that helped make India a country of extraordinary material wealth through most of her history, on the other. Later sections offer details of a functioning Indian polity of abundance and caring from the eighteenth century Chengalpattu; give a brief picture of the recent history of India; document the growth of science, technology and industry and flourishing of enterprise at different levels in Independent India; and analyse the constraints that are inhibiting India from taking her rightful place as a great, powerful and prosperous nation of the world.

The exhibition was first displayed during February 2001 at Coimbatore. Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi, the Honourable Minister of Human Resource Development and Science and Technology visited the exhibition at Coimbatore and released the book based on it.

Later, at the initiative of Srimati Uma Bharati, the Honourable Minister for Sports and Your Affairs, the exhibition was later displayed in August 2002 at the Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi. The display was inaugurated by the Honourable Deputy Prime Minister of India, who, after going through the exhibition, expressed a keen desire that it should be taken to all district headquarters and efforts should be made to make the children of India aware of the contents of this exhibition. He also wanted that the exhibition should be translated into different Indian languages and rendered into a multi-media presentation.

Subsequently, the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, under the leadership of Srimati Uma Bharati, chalked out a programme for the production of the exhibition in Hindi; for publishing books based on this exhibition in Hindi and other Indian languages; for the preparation of a multi-media presentation on the basis of the exhibition; and for carrying the exhibition to all district headquarters. The programme was to be executed jointly by the Centre and Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathana under the Ministry.

In pursuance of this programme, a Hindi version of the exhibition was prepared. The Hindi and the English versions of the exhibition were taken to all major cities of the country; at least one city in every state of India was covered in the course of this effort. in the course of 2002-2004.

The Hindi version of the book was released by Sri Chandra Shekhar, former Prime Minister of India, in the presence of Srimati Uma Bharti, the then Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, on June 30, 2004 at a function organised at Ravindra Bhawan, Bhopal. A second set of the Hindi exhibition was also prepared at this time and displayed at the gallery of Swaraj Bhawan. The exhibition at Swaraj Bhavan was inaugurated by Sri Chandra Shekhar and remained open for four days up to July 3, 2004.

The Madhya Pradesh District Resource Atlas Programme that the Centre is now pursuing is in many ways a continuation of this effort. Under the programme we are preparing materials that celebrate the land and people of different parts of India and try to give detailed information about their peculiar endowments and skills.

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