She said she did not want it to meet the same fate as poet-playwright Rabindranath Tagore's Nobel Prize medal that was stolen from West Bengal's university town of Shantiniketan in 2004 and was never recovered. "It was a burden," Athaiya, who won the award for her work in Richard Attenborough's 1982 film, Gandhi, told the daily. "I wanted the trophy to be safe in future and in the right hands."
"I do not trust anyone in India to keep it," she said, adding, "In India, no one values such things, and we lack a tradition of maintaining our heritage and things pertaining to our culture." The academy was likely to display the statuette at a motion picture museum that is being planned, the report said.