The National Film Heritage Mission (NFHM), an ambitious scheme of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B), is set to promote Indian cinema worldwide, protect national films, promote and produce non-feature films, encourage research in film archives and digital cinema among others.
The I&B Ministry established the National Film Archive of India in Pune in February 1964 with an aim to trace, acquire and preserve, for posterity, the heritage of national cinema and a representative collection of world cinema.
By the turn of the century, the NFAI had collected as many as 1,32,000 film reels or around 22,500 films.
However, there was a lack of adequate funding as well as want of sufficient facilities to preserve the films in an ideal manner.
The National Film Heritage Mission (NFHM) is aimed at the overall development of film heritage-related activities in India.
NFHM is a prestigious mission of the Government of India, for the preservation, conservation, digitization and restoration of the rich cinematic heritage of the country.
The broader objectives under NFHM are to undertake film condition assessment and preventive conservation of around 150,000 film reels, digitization of around 3500 films, picture & sound restoration of around 2000 landmark films of Indian cinema, construction of preservation and conservation facilities (vaults), training and workshops and creating a comprehensive web-based end to end IT solutions.
National Film Archive of India (NFAI) is the nodal organization for the implementation of this project. Rs. 597.41 crore has been allotted towards implementation of the project.