Ship models, silver Ram memento among 1,498 gifts to PM up for e-auction from Sept 17

The eight edition of the PM Mementos e-Auction lists 50 'hero objects' including a silver memento of the Hindu god at a base price of Rs 13.5 lakh and shirts signed by athletes.

New Delhi: Over 1,498 mementos presented to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, including miniatures of the warships INS Surat and INS Nilgiri, a model of HMS Victory and a silver memento of Hindu god Ram from Karnataka, will go under the hammer from 17 September—the PM’s birthday. The proceeds will be routed to the Namami Gange programme, Union Culture and Tourism Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat said on Wednesday.

The eighth edition of the PM Mementos e-Auction will run until October 31 on www.pmmementos.gov.in, Shekhawat said at a press interaction at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), which coordinates the exercise. An exhibition of the objects will be held alongside the bidding.

Shekhawat said the practice was being facilitated as Modi believes that “Whatever is received is not mine; whatever is given to me is not mine; and I have no right to hoard what is not mine”. The minister added that the auction turned personal gifts into a channel for public participation and a national cause.

The edition lists 50 “hero objects”. The silver memento of Ram carries a base price of Rs 13.5 lakh, followed by a silver replica of the Kakatiya Kala Thoranam at Rs 9 lakh, a framed Tree of Life Gond painting at Rs 7.5 lakh, a Jagannath Parivar on a chariot at Rs 6 lakh and a gold-plated framed Radha Krishna artwork at Rs 5.4 lakh. The objects have been sourced from across states, with West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Assam, Bihar and Odisha among the larger representations.

The ship models trace Modi’s engagements with the armed forces and foreign counterparts. INS Surat, a Project 15B guided-missile destroyer, and INS Nilgiri, the lead ship of the Project 17A stealth frigate line, were commissioned by Modi at the Naval Dockyard in Mumbai in January 2025, along with the submarine INS Vaghsheer. HMS Victory, the model of which is also on offer, is the Royal Navy ship of the line that served as Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and is preserved at Portsmouth.

Each object carries a unique identification number and a record of its measurements, material, physical condition, cultural context and artistic background, Shekhawat said. The National Informatics Centre handles portal support, the State Bank of India the payment gateway, India Post and a fine-art handling agency the packing and delivery, while customs officers, valuers and NGMA staff handle evaluation.

Asked about the fall in collections — Rs 1.89 crore in the seventh edition against Rs 2.24 crore in the sixth — Shekhawat said the total depended on which objects entered a given year and the bidding they drew. “Which objects come in a given year, which objects are selected, and how much interest they attract — this is beyond our control,” he said. Some pieces triggered competitive bidding that pushed prices above their base, while others did not, he said. “Someone buys for a few lakh a statue that sells for a few thousand in the market. They are paying for the sentiment attached to it, not the object.”

Across seven editions, 7,741 objects have been auctioned and about Rs 52 crore raised for the Ganga mission, Shekhawat said. In the first five editions, 92,000 people registered as bidders. A painting of a Prayagraj ghat sold for Rs 74.5 lakh and a T-shirt signed by para-shooter Manish Narwal for Rs 50 lakh, he said. A Banaras ghat artwork fetched Rs 64.8 lakh in the 2023 edition, while the seventh edition listed a statue of Goddess Bhavani at a base price of Rs 1.03 crore.

The auction was launched in 2019 and has been held each year since. The 2022 edition offered a black granite model statue of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose by sculptor Arun Yogiraj, whose team had carved the statue installed at India Gate. The sixth edition, in 2024, offered a replica of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya at a base price of Rs 5.5 lakh and shoes of Paralympic medallists. The seventh edition also opened on Modi’s 75th birthday and featured memorabilia from India’s para-athletes at the Paris Paralympics 2024, a Tanjore painting of the Ram Durbar, a Nataraja statue and a Naga shawl.

Shekhawat traced the practice to Modi’s tenure as Gujarat chief minister, when gifts he received were auctioned to fund the Kanya Kelvani campaign for girls’ education, and to a period when Modi directed his salary and savings towards the welfare of staff at the chief minister’s residence. Modi carried the practice into office and tied the mementos to the Ganga mission from 2014, when he first contested from Varanasi, Shekhawat said.

“This is service before self,” Shekhawat said. He appealed to citizens, collectors, corporates and institutions to register and bid, saying each object came with a documented account of who made it, where it came from and how it was crafted, available from the department.

(Edited by Chingkheinganbi Mayengbam)