Plan of the Netaji birthplace museum. Picture by Sarat Patra

Bhubaneswar, Dec. 30: The ancestral house of revered leader Subhash Chandra Bose would be restored shortly.

Today, culture minister Maheswar Mohanty along with Puri MP Pinaki Mishra, tourism secretary Sudrashan Pal Thakur, culture commissioner-cum-secretary Sanjeev Kumar Mishra and Puri Municipality chairman Jayant Kumar Sarangi inaugurated the project and laid the foundation stone.

Situated at Gopal Ballav Road in the beach town, the freedom fighter’s ancestral house is being renovated by the state department of culture in association with the state tourism department and the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (Intach). In 1916, the Cuttack-born national leader’s father Jankinath Bose constructed the building.

“We will begin work immediately and try to complete work in 2014,” said A.B. Tripathy, convener of Intach, Odisha state chapter.

The building, which is in debris, had been under a legal fight between the district collector’s office and the heirs of Bose’s relatives since 1997.

On July 27, the culture department took possession of the structure from the tehsildar. “The collector asked the descendants to retain Netaji’s name on the lease or provide death certificate of Jankinath Bose to renew the lease in their name. The matter had been pending for years till February, when the revenue divisional commissioner decided that the state government would pay money, spent on building the house, to the Bose family and the collector would take possession of the land,” said district culture officer Prafulla Samantaray.

After the culture minister and a culture department team paid a visit to the bungalow in August, it was proposed that the building would be repaired and then turned into a museum.

Spread across almost half-an-acre, the monument is mostly in ruins. Even the antiquity value of most of the items and articles found in the house is not high. But, the memories of Subhash Bose associated with the monument make it significant, said a culture department official.

“The house bears a marble nameplate of Brajendranath Bose and Supriya Bose, members of the Bose family. Freedom fighters say Subhash Bose had conducted some secret meetings of his Forward Bloc in this house,” said Samantaray.