Gwalior (Madhya Pradesh): Thieves stole documents related to land cases from Moti Mahal Archives in Gwalior on Thursday night.
According to reports, the thieves had made off with around a truckload of documents. The matter came to light after the people working in the archives reached there on Friday morning.
They found a broken lock on the ground floor. When they went inside they found clothes used to wrap and store all documents lying on the floor. Earlier the floor had land documents.
The workers posted in the archives said that they saw tread marks of a truck outside the office.
The office was used to store the documents from 1940 to this date.
Sandhya Joshi, said that the record room had documents related to land cases pending in the court or awaiting transfer or were part of bigger property disputes. The archives also used to store Khasra Khatauni but were moved out sometime ago.
Joshi further said that it was not the first case of document theft in the archive. Earlier on 15 January 2019 and 18 September 2021 the archive was targeted by thieves who ran away with documents.
Notably, even after repeated cases of theft the archive wasn’t provided with any protection nor was staffed with watchmen.
The workers of the archive claimed that they had requested several times from the district administration to deploy security personnel but the matter wasn’t considered with seriousness.
In charge of the Archive, SDM Yunus Kuraishi, however said that now the arrangements were made to deploy the security personnel there.
