The Nehru Archive

The Nehru Archive is a digital library of Jawaharlal Nehru’s letters, speeches, photographs, and more. It is a significant undertaking by the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund to create a world-class digital archive on the life, work, and thoughts of the first prime minister of India.

The project started with a humble brief: to digitise all volumes of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. It wasn’t until we started sifting through the physical books alongside eminent modern historians (and former editors of this publication) that the magnitude and the depth of the information was realised. The 100 volumes of Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru collates over 35,000 artefacts (letters, speeches, parliamentary debates, diary entries, etc.) and thousands of visuals (photographs, cartoons, maps, etc.) covering 61 years (1903−1964) of Nehru’s life. These are accompanied by extensive annotations, abbreviations, and glossaries. Cumulatively, that’s over 70,000 pages of content in English, Hindi, and a dozen other languages. The sheer scale and diversity of information was mind-boggling.

Miranj rose to the occasion and played an instrumental role in immersion into the published volumes, interpretation of the project brief, and imagination of possible product directions. We benchmarked global archives¹, interviewed academics and history scholars, and facilitated stakeholder conversations to distil the project journey into three distinct directions. After due deliberation, all stakeholders unanimously decided to undertake the moonshot approach: to unlock all the content from physical books/​PDFs into a completely web-native format that is responsive, accessible, fully-searchable and meticulously tagged (by themes, people, places, events, organisations, and publications). If this ambition wasn’t stiff enough, the team also accepted a challenging target to achieve this herculean endeavour by 14^th November 2025 — offering a little over a year to digitise 105 physical books that were originally published between 1972 and 2019.

Once word got out, there was no looking back. Drawing on our experience of creating large knowledge portals², we charted a detailed 3‑stage execution plan that would enable each workstream — content publishing, design, and development — to execute their responsibilities in parallel.

• Development kicked off with the implementation of the underlying content and metadata models using Craft CMS, closely followed by the rollout of a multi-step publishing workflow (metadata seeding, artefact upload, review, correction, and approval).
• In stage 2, we created a prototype frontend that established the functional UX for browsing, filtering, and searching the material.
• Stage 3 incorporated the final visual design/​presentation layer.

The Nehru Archive project was anchored by Oijo, who also coordinated a large team for the content upload. Now Form led the visual design. JNMF digitised the physical books into OCR-ed PDFs and offered key decisions, editorial oversight and support through the journey. For over a year, each contributor worked with clockwork precision to achieve the project target date. The project was soft-launched exactly on the promised date of 14^th November 2025 and was announced to the public soon after.