The Indian government, in a recent move to underline rural India’s exceptional cultural heritage, has catalogued unique characteristics of over a lakh villages nationwide. This comprehensive exercise has been executed under the ‘Mera Gaon Meri Dharohar’ (My Village My Heritage) program incorporated within the National Mission for Cultural Mapping (NMCM).
An Overview of the Mera Gaon Meri Dharohar Programme
The programme involves identifying and mapping cultural treasures and artistic stocks of the nation. This includes various art forms, handcrafts, skills, knowledge traditions, and other cultural practices, whether they are oral, aural, visual, or kinetic. During the cultural mapping process, significant information regarding the ritualistic, social, and economic standing of the artists and craftsmen within the communities is also considered noteworthy and hence, recorded.
Categorization of Villages
The villages are assorted into seven to eight groups based on ecological, developmental, and historical importance, alongside cultural aspects such as eminent textiles, products, or connections to historical or mythological events like the Independence struggle or epics like the Mahabharata.
Ecological Category
Villages like the Bishnoi village in Rajasthan, famous for living harmoniously with nature, and Raini village, known for the Chipko movement, fall under this category.
Developmental Importance
Modhera in Gujarat, being the first solar-powered village in India, signifies developmental importance.
Historical Villages
Villages like Kandel in Madhya Pradesh, the location of the celebrated “Jal Satyagraha”, Hanol in Uttarakhand and Vidurashwathar of Karnataka, which are associated with the Mahabharata, Suketi in Himachal Pradesh, home to Asia’s oldest fossil park, and Pandrethan in Kashmir, the village of Shaivite mystic Lal Ded, showcase historical significance.
Survey Process
The survey for cultural asset mapping was conducted through field surveys by joint teams of the Ministry of Culture and the Common Services Centres (CSC), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Citizens actively participated, sharing unique features of their village, block, or district. The survey involved a CSC Village Level Entrepreneur (VLE) organizing meetings with locals and uploading intriguing facts about their village on a dedicated application.
Future Prospects
The Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts plans to cover all 6.5 lakh villages in India, creating special films highlighting the unique heritage of 6,500 village clusters. They have made short films on 750 cluster villages using drones. Detailed dossiers on these villages, along with the films, will be accessible on a web portal named “The National Cultural Work Place”. This portal will include a virtual living museum of all documented villages and a feature to upload a village through crowd-sourcing, allowing villagers to edit and upload village data themselves.
National Mission for Cultural Mapping (NMCM)
Launched by the Ministry of Culture in 2017, the NMCM aims to develop an extensive database of art forms, artists, and other resources across the country. Initially slow-paced, the programme was handed over to the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA) in 2021. The mission was approved a budget of ₹469 crore for three years.
Last Modified: February 20, 2024