NEW DELHI: "For as long as I can remember, I've held a paint-brush and paint," says Sunita Jha, Mithila-painter from Darbhanga, Bihar. She'd started - as her mother and grandmother did - with walls. "Then we moved to cloth. First wall-hangings and then kurtas and bedcovers. Things meant for regular use sell more," says Jha.

The handicraft department's officials had started visiting from December 2014 and that's when they first broached the subject to Ghose. "They were proposing a three-storey building for the academy to replace the crafts museum. We have a collection of 33,000 objects of which only 3,000 are on display. I told them, if anything, the museum needs more space for more galleries. There's a Charles Correa building, and the open display areas were designed by great architects. You can't just knock it down and build something else."

Then, the museum was under the department of handloom but by February, the ministry fixed this anomaly and moved it to the Department of Handicraft.

Before a renovation project was taken up in January 2011, the total number of visitors in December 2010 was just 1,820 and the revenues from the museum shop amounted to Rs 11.10 lakh. Ironically, the ministry is running intervention just when it was making a turnaround. An initial allocation of Rs 4.5 crore helped refurbish the shop (it became Lota Shop) and cafeteria (Cafe Lota) and added a Shilp Kuteer for visiting crafts-persons.

More funds were sought and Rs 23.6 crore was granted. About 40% of that has been used—on a new library, a kitchen for the Kuteer, among other things. The plans had to go through committees and the museum is within 100 metres of Purana Qila; it was practically impossible to move files any faster.