Plan to retrieve botanical treasures in digital format

NEW DELHI: India is taking tentative steps to retrieve, in digital form, some of its botanical treasures which were taken away to Britain in 1947.
The Union environment ministry plans to get back more than 30,000 prized botanical ‘‘type specimens’’ from London’s Royal Botanic Garden or Kew Gardens.
Type specimens are ‘‘standard reference material’’ — original specimens on which new species descriptions have been based.It is considered critical for enumerating and monitoring changes in bio-diversity. As these typify and fix a species name for all time, they are invaluable to researchers.
Ministry additional secretary A M Gokhale and the Botanical Survey of India director visited Kew last month to explore the possibility of converting sets of physical specimens on herbarium sheets into detailed digitised images which can be stored on CDs or put on the web. Kew has more than 250,000 of ‘type specimens’.
However, a formal proposal on this will have to clear not just the environment ministry but also the finance and external affairs ministries.
While the national herbarium in Kolkata has over 20 lakh specimens but less than 20,000 of these are ‘type specimens’, a collection built up since 1947. Gokhale says most of the specimens collected by the British over 200 years of colonial rule were sent to Kew, leaving almost nothing behind.
For some years, the government has had a scientist posted in London help those who need to continuously reference this wealth. A researcher here has to make a sanitised specimen, post it to Kew and then wait for confirmation on the species.
The task of converting these reference sets will be laborious. Specimens will have to be scanned, high-resolution images will have to be linked to related data stored separately.
The Indians will have to provide their own manpower and equipment for a job which, at ‘‘a very rough estimate’’, would cost 500,000 pounds and take up to three years. The ministry may try to raise funds from the British government or the UN’s global environment facility.