The National Film Archive of India (NFAI) was established as a media unit of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in February 1964.

Its distribution library consists of about 25 active members throughout the country and it also organizes joint screening programmes on a weekly, fortnightly and monthly basis in six important centres.

[9] The NFAI's archive keeps a stock of films, video cassettes, DVDs, books, posters, stills, press clippings, slides, audio CDs, and disc records of Indian cinema dating back to the 1910s.

[7] On 8 January 2003, a large fire caused a massive destruction in the vault of NFAI housed in the Prabhat Studio complex of FTII in Pune, in which unduplicated irreplaceable films with a nitrate base were destroyed.

[10] Ravi Shankar Prasad the then Minister of State, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India announced in the Rajya Sabha that 607 films in 5,097 reels were lost in the fire.