Information and Broadcasting Minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday, September 8, 2015 launched an e-version of the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi, and described them as a national treasure that has acquired global prominence and will continue to do so.
The minister also announced that the Hindi version of CWMG would be digitised soon.
"The writing of Mahatma Gandhi is a treasure which would benefit all people and can be shared digitally with no cost," Jaitley said.
The event hosted at the Gandhi Peace Foundation, marked the formal launch of the e-version of the 100 volumes of the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi in the form of DVDs and the uplinking of data on the Gandhi Heritage portal.
According to the reports, "Gandhi's writings, scattered all over the world, have been collected and constructed with stringent academic discipline as part of the project."
The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG-original-KS-edition, called so after Prof. K. Swaminathan, the chief architect of the original series) had taken about 38 years in the making (1956-1994). They are a series of 100 volumes, running into over 55,000 pages, intricately connected across the series, as an integrated whole.
All this is now available in a CD. A CD was launched by Minister of Information and Broadcasting Arun Jaitley. Dinaben Patel - A renowned Gandhian Scholar and co contributor of the CD version says this will help maximise the reach of Gandhianism at a time when the world is facing number of manmade crises.
This content will be free to be viewed on internet at Gandhi Heritage Portal. Master copy is also to be preserved in National Archives so that Gandhi's legacy is not lost.
The e-project was executed by the Publications Division of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry with support from the Gujarat Vidyapeeth, which is based in Ahmedabad. It was supervised by a three-member committee of experts on Gandhi, comprising of Professor Sudershan Iyengar, former vice chancellor of Gujarat Vidyapeeth, Dinaben Patel, an eminent Gandhian scholar, and Tridip Suhrud, director of the Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust, over the past four years.