(Top) Chittaranjan Panda; Swapan Chakravorty

Chittaranjan Panda, the secretary and curator of the Victoria Memorial Hall, retired on Tuesday, ending an association of one-and-a-half decades.

Swapan Chakravorty, the director-general of the National Library, will hold the post for now.

“He (Panda) retires today. There has been no extension. The director general of the National Library will hold additional charge until a new curator is selected from the large number of names received in response to advertisements,” said Union culture secretary Jawhar Sircar.

For Chakravorty, it was a pleasant surprise “faxed just this morning”. “But it will be just a stopgap arrangement and a new curator will take over soon,” he told Metro soon after the formal handover of charge.

The interim curator and the new curator after him both have a major task at hand. The ministry of culture and the Victoria board of trustees, chaired by the governor, are initiating large-scale renovation and restoration with a fresh grant of over a hundred crores and a host of experts from various fields.

Senior officials of the culture ministry had earlier expressed displeasure at the way Victoria was being run and central government grants were being returned unused year after year.

Asked why a new curator hadn’t been selected yet, the joint secretary of the culture ministry, Vijay Madan, said from Delhi: “The selection procedure must run its course, especially if the person selected is already holding a different post. But we have a very capable person to run things till then.”

Panda was unavailable for comment.