Anyone with an adult memory of 1947 is now in their nineties. Anyone who remembers the canal colonies as home is older. Within a few years there will be nobody left who saw the undivided province.
The 1947 Partition Archive has recorded more than ten thousand testimonies. Citizens' Archive of Pakistan has recorded on the other side. Individual researchers and families have recorded more. Together it is a fraction of what could have been recorded and was not.
The same applies to everything else on this site. The last people who used a Persian wheel, who saw a mirasi sing a family's genealogy, who remember what a jathera's story was, who knew the names on a plaque, are alive now and will not be alive in fifteen years.
Recording an old person talking costs a phone and an afternoon. It requires no institution, no funding and no permission.
That is the single most useful thing anyone reading this could do, and it is the reason this project exists in the form it does.
The people who were adults in 1947 are almost all gone. The people who were children then are in their eighties and nineties, and they are the last direct witnesses.
The 1980s witnesses are in their sixties and seventies and are not being recorded either, in part because the subject is still dangerous to discuss in some districts.
The 1947 Partition Archive and a few academic projects have recorded thousands of interviews. That is a fraction of what could have been done and the window closes within this decade.