The beginning of the National Archives of India might be followed back to the year 1860 when Sandeman, the Civil Auditor, in his report focused on the need of diminishing the workplaces of clog by devastation of the papers of routine nature and move of every single profitable record to a 'Stupendous Central Archive'. Be that as it may, things took a solid shape in 1889, when Professor G.W. Forrest of Elphinstone College, Bombay was depended the activity of inspecting the records of the Foreign Department of the Government of India. Prior, he had earned notoriety as an Archivist for his work in the Bombay Records Office. In his report, he made a solid supplication for moving all records of the organization of East India Company to a Central Repository. Subsequently, Imperial Records Department (IRD) appeared on 11 March 1891 which was situated in Imperial Secretariat Building at Calcutta (Kolkata). Educator G.W Forrest was made its Officer in Charge. His fundamental undertaking was to analyze, move, mastermind and index records of the considerable number of Departments and to arrange a Central Library instead of different Departmental Libraries. After G.W. Forrest, the work at Imperial Records Department (IRD) advanced well under S.C. Slope (1900), C.R. Wilson (1902), N.L. Hallward (1904), E. Denison Ross (1905), A.F. Scholfield (1915), R.A. Blaker (1919), J.M. Mitra (1920) and Rai Bahadur A.F.M. Abdul Ali (1922-1938) who were researchers just as Records Keepers in their very own right.
