Talking to APP, he said, "Lok Virsa (National Institute of Folk and Traditional Heritage) supports all kind of cultural activities across the country and this year, the organisation arranged over 100 programmes to promote cultural heritage of the country. These programmes included exhibitions, festivals, training workshops, youth activities, musical evenings and others.
Lok Virsa's popular theme, "Harnessing Culture towards Education", also invited thousands of students from various schools, colleges and universities of the country to visit Heritage Museum that portrays living history of the country, he said.
Lok Virsa (National Institute of Folk & Traditional Heritage), a specialised organisation dealing with documentation and preservation of Pakistan's traditional culture, has declared Friday as "student day" and offered free access on this day to students of schools, colleges and universities to its ethnographical museum known as Heritage Museum situated here at Shakarparian. The museum depicts living cultural traditions and lifestyles of the people of Pakistan both from the mainstream and the remotest regions of the country.
Khalid Javaid informed that the primary purpose of the museum is to educate and edify present and future generations of Pakistan and to create a treasure house for the nation more valuable than the vault of any bank in the world.
The museum houses a covered area of 60,000 sq.ft featuring exhibit halls, making it the largest museum in Pakistan.
Executive director, Lok Virsa, who is also a renowned craft expert, said "Lok Virsa is a storehouse of cultural materials preserved for prosperity and free use by researchers, scholars and students. The work at Lok Virsa is not carried out in the spirit of museum storage of antiquities with no attempt whatsoever to preserve what in the culture is still vital. Lok Virsa does not view its role in the same way as archaeological remains that one must hold in storage, but as living heritage which has a role to play in real life within the context of present day Pakistan".
About five thousand students from all over Pakistan visited Heritage Museum during period from July to October 2012 and acquainted themselves about the rich cultural heritage of the country presented in a 3-dimensional creative manner at Lok Virsa.
Besides Heritage Museum, the visiting students had also the benefit of having access to the Heritage Library of Lok Virsa, located within Heritage Museum, which has a collection of over 10,000 books and journals.
It is the only public library in the world addressing Pakistan's traditional culture and continues to serve national and international students, scholars and researchers.
The numerous manuscripts, original reports, field surveys and research monographs on Pakistani culture are accessible to anyone. With these facilities providing education to youth in cultural heritage, one can truly call Lok Virsa as a storehouse of Pakistani cultural heritage.