Hi Dan,
The path of the project and the path of the data file both were different however that has now been corrected by me and both files are now within the ext. HDD folder named GIS. I mentioned earlier that I had removed them from C drive on my computer as suggested by Jayanta above and now both the files are on an ext. HDD in a folder named GIS.
Even after this exercise, the data source is not displaying in ArcMAP.
Just to check I launched a new blank map and then load the data source into i, I right-clicked the attribute table to see if it contained any data in the table. The table was having only 3 columns in it which was previously showing a number of other columns.
I fail to understand the reason why it is not being displayed on the map?