The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
ASI will ‘delist’ some ‘lost’ monuments. What’s happening, and why?
THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL Survey of India (ASI) has decided to delist 18 “centrally protected monuments” that it has assessed are not of national importance. The 18 are part of an earlier list of monuments the ASI had said were “untraceable”.
These include a medieval highway milestone recorded as Kos Minar No.13 at Mujessar village in Haryana, Barakhamba Cemeteryindelhi,gunnerburkill’stombinjhansi district, a cemetery at Gaughat in Lucknow, and the Telia Nala Buddhist ruins in Varanasi. The precise location of these monuments, or their current physical state, is not known.
What does ‘delisting’ mean?
The ASI, which works under the Union Ministry of Culture, is responsible for protecting and maintaining certain monuments and archaeological sites that have been declared of national importance under The Ancient Monuments Preservation
Act, 1904 and The Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958 (AMASR Act).
Delisting a monument effectively means it will no longer be conserved and protected by the ASI. Under the AMASR Act, any kind of construction-related activity is not allowed around a protected site. Once the monument is delisted, activities related to construction and urbanisation in the area can be carried out in a regular manner.
ASI currently has 3,693 monuments under its purview, which will fall to 3,675 once the delisting exercise is completed in the next few weeks. This is the first such largescale delisting exercise in several decades.
The gazette notification for the 18 monuments in question was issued on March 8. There is a two-month window for the public to send in “objections or suggestions”.
What does it mean for a monument to be ‘untraceable’?
Theamasractprotectsmonumentsand sites that are more than 100 years old, including temples, cemeteries, inscriptions, tombs, forts, palaces, step-wells, rock-cut caves, and even objects like cannons and mile pillars (kos minars) that may be of historical significance. These sites are scattered across the country and, over the decades, some have been lost to activities such as urbanisation, encroachments, the construction of dams and reservoirs, or sheer neglect.
Under the AMASR Act, the ASI should regularly inspect protected monuments. In cases of encroachment, the ASI can file a police complaint, issue a show-cause notice for the removal of the encroachment, and communicate to the local administration the need for demolition of encroachments.
This, however, has not happened with uniform effectiveness. The ASI was founded in 1861. The bulk of the currently protected monuments were taken under the ASI’S wings from the 1920s to the 1950s, but in the decades after Independence, the government spent its meagre resources more on health, education and infrastructure, than protecting heritage, officials said. The ASI also concentrated more on uncovering new monuments and sites instead of protecting existing ones.
How many historical monuments have been lost in this way?
In December 2022, the Ministry of Culture submitted to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture that 50 of India’s 3,693 centrally protected monuments were missing. Fourteen of these had been lost to rapid urbanisation, 12 were submerged by reservoirs/ dams, and the remaining 24 were untraceable, the Ministry told the Committee.
The Committee was informed that security guards were posted at only 248 of the 3,693 protected monuments. In its report on ‘Issues relating to Untraceable Monuments and Protection of Monuments in India’, the Committee “noted with dismay that out of the total requirement of 7,000 personnel for the protection of monuments, the government could provide only 2,578 security personnel at 248 locations due to budgetary constraints”.
Was 2022 the first time that the disappearance of these monuments was noticed?
ASI officials had told The Indian Express then that no comprehensive physical survey of all monuments had ever been conducted after Independence. However, in 2013, a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India had said that at least 92 centrally protected monuments across the country had gone missing.
The CAG report said that the ASI did not have reliable information on the exact number of monuments under its protection. It recommended that periodic inspection of each protected monument be carried out. The Culture ministry accepted the proposal.
The Parliamentary panel noted that “out of the 92 monuments declared as missing by the CAG, 42 have been identified due to efforts made by the ASI”. Of the remaining 50, 26 were accounted for, as mentioned earlier, while the other 24 remained untraceable. Eleven of these monuments are in Uttar Pradesh, two each in Delhi and Haryana, and others in states like Assam, West Bengal, Arunachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand.