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Rural Museum in Limbo

Rural Museum in Limbo
Rural Museum in Limbo

Hope for establishing the Museum of Rural Life in northern Golestan Province, whose construction was supposed to begin in mid-2015, is rapidly fading.

“The project will never commence as long as insignificant issues remain unresolved,” Mahmoud Taleqani, the project manager, was quoted as saying by Mehr News Agency. He did not give any inclination as to what are the “insignificant” problems that the relevant officials have been unable or unwilling to resolve.

Nevertheless, he still holds out hope that Masoud Soltanifar, head of Iran’s Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization, will eventually intervene and remove the bureaucratic hurdles, which are often “unreal and made-up”, that have delayed the project for six months and counting.

The project has a budget of 10 billion rials ($278,000).

During the previous two administrations, officials often spoke about setting up similar museums in the provinces, “but that never amounted to anything — they didn’t even reach the preliminary phase of feasibility studies.”

“However, when this government took office, things progressed fast and we were even given a budget to begin the project, but red tape has stymied those efforts,” Taleqani said.

Financialtribune.com