A short list of the people this site has relied on, who were not paid and were not asked.
The Sodhi families who have held manuscripts for four centuries. The Bhatt families who kept genealogies in a private script. The pandas at Haridwar and Pehowa with their registers.
Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha, who spent fourteen years on an encyclopaedia. Sahib Singh, who wrote a grammar so that a text could be read correctly. Ganda Singh, who printed the documents.
Karamjit Singh Kalia, who spent twenty-two years recovering five names from a war memorial.
The Ghadar survivors who built a museum out of their own subscriptions because nobody else would.
Bhagat Puran Singh, who carried a man on his back for fourteen years and then printed pamphlets about soil erosion on scrap paper.
The Panjab Digital Library, taking a scanner to a village because the manuscript will not travel.
Sant Balbir Singh Seechewal, who cleaned a river by hand.
None of them was commissioned. All of them just started.
The record that exists at all exists because individuals kept it: a granthi who kept a manuscript dry, a family that did not sell a photograph, a schoolteacher who wrote the village history nobody asked for.
None of them was paid or thanked. Most of the material this site rests on was preserved by somebody with no institution behind them.
That is also the argument for doing it now. What survives the next thirty years will be what somebody decides to keep, and the deciding is happening whether or not anybody notices.