2nd tranche of 25 Netaji files to be released this month

New Delhi, Feb 14: The second tranche of 25 secret files on Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose is likely to be declassified this month, Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma has said.

"We are going to release 25 secret files every month. We are ready with the files that are going to be released this month," Sharma said when asked about declassification of the Netaji files.

The government had earlier said National Archives of India (NAI) would release digital copies of declassified files on Bose every month.

As many as hundred secret files were made public by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Netaji's 119th birth anniversary on January 23.

The next set of files are likely to be made public on February 23. "A set of 25 files on Netaji may be released on February 23. It is also expected that the files will be released on 23rd of every month afterwards," a source said.

The files, released last month, comprised over 16,600 pages of historic documents, ranging from those of the British Raj to as late as 2007, an official had said.

NAI also opened a dedicated website to store all the declassified files related to Bose. In October last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met the family members of Netaji and announced that the government would declassify the files relating to the leader whose disappearance 70 years ago remains a mystery.

While two commissions of inquiry had concluded that Netaji had died in a plane crash in Taipei on August 18, 1945, a third probe panel, headed by Justice M K Mukherjee, had contested it and suggested that Bose was alive after that.

PTI