New Delhi: Over 2,700 gifts Prime Minister Narendra Modi received from across the country will go under the hammer from September 14 and the fund generated will be used for conservation and rejuvenation of the Ganga, Culture Minister Prahlad Patel said, Wednesday.
Currently on display at the National Gallery of Modern Arts (NGMA) here, a total of 2,772 gifts including head gears, shawls, portraits, swords gifted by different organisations and Chief Ministers to the Prime Minister will be up for the auction on an online portal designed by the National Informatics Centre.
“The gifts received by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the last six months will be auctioned. This time the auction will be completely online (earlier an auction happened in January). The minimum reserved price for the items is Rs 200 while the highest is Rs 2.5 lakh,” Prahlad Patel informed.
At a base price of Rs 2.5 lakh, a portrait of Modi done on silk and gifted by couturier and the owner of ‘Seematti Textile’s Beena Kannan has been tagged as the most expensive item. The base or reserved price of the items has been fixed by experts.
The mementos include 576 shawls, 964 angavastram (clothes), 88 pagris (head-dress) and various jackets portraying the diversity of India. There are also many replicas of cow.
Joshi informed that the items up for auction which are being displayed at NGMA will be changed every 15 days.
In the January auction, over 1,800 gifts received by Narendra Modi were sold in a fortnight-long exercise and around 4,000 bidders participated. The funds generated went towards the ‘Namami Gange’, a Central Government project to clean the Ganga. The proceeds from the upcoming auction will also go to the same project.
PTI
