Unwavering political will is the need of the hour

December 22, 2014 12:19 am | Updated November 16, 2021 04:50 pm IST

Residents and tourists light candles to show solidarity with the cause of saving heritage buildings on Beach Road in Puducherry. Photo: S.S. KUMAR

Residents and tourists light candles to show solidarity with the cause of saving heritage buildings on Beach Road in Puducherry. Photo: S.S. KUMAR

Even as it emerges that what can possibly be rebuilt in place of the fallen French-era Mayoral office, the Mairie, is at best a look-alike, the conservation debate among agencies and a galvanised civil society is focused on the future of the city’s globally renowned heritage.

Notwithstanding the reaffirmations of the Government on its commitment to preserve the city’s heritage, the road ahead in preserving the unique Franco-Tamil architectural legacy would require a combination of unwavering political will, resourcefulness in sourcing funding and technical partnerships and a higher level of civil society engagement.

There has been a lack of consistency, a non-standard response, to the preservation of heritage buildings, and this has resulted in a constellation of old structures within the city’s core, where for every successful conservation story there are several-fold more examples of neglect. The involvement of multiple government agencies in the management of each heritage structure does not make the task of conservation any easier.

According to experts, the lack of a Heritage Act remains the most glaring lacuna in the daunting challenge of keeping intact the city’s amalgamated Franco-Tamil heritage. However, conservation experts say that even for a well-enunciated policy and an Act to work, several factors of dissonance among conservation agencies and government departments require to be ironed out.

One central question to be resolved, according to experts, is the question who certifies a building to be safe or unsafe, and how?

For instance, at a high-level meeting post-the Mairie collapse on conserving other endangered structures, Government officials took the position that the Raj Nivas, Assembly and PWD headquarters buildings — built at around the same period — were safe as they were being regularly maintained and that the other Government buildings had outlived their life-span, were unsafe and hence needed to be taken down. The line of reasoning where regularly maintained buildings are considered safe is in fact an admission of the fact that the fate of these structures are determined more by regular maintenance and less by age/life-span, say the team at INTACH, Puducherry.

The question then arises as to why the other Government buildings were not maintained in the first place.

“While INTACH is not at all in favour of keeping unsafe buildings in the condition they are in, it also has to acknowledged that these are not just any building but constitute a significant part of Pondicherry’s history and lend to Pondicherry that distinctive character which sets it apart from towns like, say Cuddalore or Tindivanam,” says A. K. Das, of INTACH, Puducherry.

While making the case for the preservation of such buildings, though certainly not at the cost of public safety, the next line of advocacy would be whether these structures can be made safe again. “If we can’t, then they should definitely be demolished and replaced by look-alikes built with traditional materials and techniques with suitable modifications,” says Mr. Das.

According to experts in the agency, INTACH has in its over 20 years of engagement in this region successfully restored several so-called unsafe buildings which were in far worse condition than many legacy buildings now being discussed in Puducherry after the collapse of the Mairie.

(Concluded)

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