Ahead of the annual commemoration to honour the victims of the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, demands have been renewed to list the exact number of lives lost to the brutality of the colonial troops on the fateful day.Former MP Tarlochan Singh, who is Member of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Jallianwala Bagh National Memorial Trust, on Saturday wrote a letter to Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann demanding the authentication of the names of martyrs and a publication of the relevant list.The death toll in the massacre ordered by Brigadier General Reginald E H Dyer remains a matter of historical debate in the absence of definitive records. While the official British estimate was 379 deaths and nearly 1,200 injuries, an independent probe by the Indian National Congress put the number of dead at over 1,000. Other sources and historians have argued that anywhere between 700 to 2,000 people died that day.The letter by Tarlochan Singh to the CM and Punjab Chief Secretary KAP Sinha, comes on the eve of the Trust commemoration of the martyrs.“On Monday, we are gathering in Jallianwala Bagh to pay tribute to the memory of hundreds of innocent martyrs who were killed during firing by General Dyer on Baisakhi Day 1919. I as Member of the Jallianwala Bagh Trust… have been requesting the Punjab Government to provide us an approved list with all the names of the martyrs so that we could display that in the Jallianwala Bagh Complex,” the letter by Singh to Punjab CM stated.It added that in spite of many reminders to the Punjab Government on the issue, the Trust was still awaiting the list: “The martyr’s families have genuine protest against us that we could not so far fulfill their wishes to see the names of their ancestors who laid their lives for freedom of India,” Singh said in the correspondence.The former MP also recalled how the previous Punjab Government headed by Capt Amrinder Singh put up a memorial in Ranjit Avenue despite objections.Later speaking to The Tribune, Singh said it was unacceptable that the country did not know the number of martyrs of the massacre even 107 years after its occurrence.In December of 2000, the Punjab Government had made some progress on the front and decided to determine the list of martyrs. The Department of Tourism and Cultural Affairs, Public Relations and the Amritsar administration were tasked with the project to authenticate the credentials of those who died in the massacre and draft a list. Amritsar’s Guru Nanak Dev University and the Jallianwala Bagh National Memorial Trust were also to be roped in, but nothing came of it.Sources privy to the subject said one list from the British times is available in the office of Amritsar Deputy Commissioner. It lists 501 but marks several of them unidentified. This list, the sources added, should be the starting point and help should be taken from the Jallianwala Bagh Shaheed Parivar Samiti, which has been engaged in the task of documenting the descendants of victims.