India offers diaspora chance to seek out ancestors

A new scheme will allow millions of people of Indian origin to retrace their roots, generations after European colonisers took their ancestors across the seas to alien lands to work as indentured labourers, researchers say.

The "Ancestral Search Programme", set up by the Ministry of Culture's Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, will assist many of India's 25-million-strong diaspora to find their origins.

Organisers say the scheme will focus on helping the descendents of around 13 million Indians shipped by British and French colonisers to work as labourers in sugarcane plantations on former island colonies in the 19th and early 20th centuries.