India’s first ‘Digital Archive’ is located at which place in Rajasthan?

State archives across India preserve administrative and historical records, but the title ‘India’s first digital archive’ belongs specifically to the institution that pioneered large-scale digitisation of its holdings and made them searchable online for the public.

The Rajasthan State Archives is headquartered in Bikaner. From the mid-2000s it undertook a major digitisation project covering Mughal-era Persian farmans, nishans and manshurs along with administrative records of Rajasthan’s princely states; by 2013 it had launched an online portal giving public access to scanned copies of these records, which is why it is recognised as India’s first digital archive.

Jodhpur, Kota and Ajmer each carry their own historical significance — Jodhpur has a branch office of the state archives besides its forts, Kota is known for the Chambal river region, and Ajmer for the Dargah Sharif — but the digitisation initiative and the ‘first digital archive’ status are credited specifically to the Bikaner headquarters, not to these other cities.