The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has decided to form a special committee to trace and certify 24 protected monuments which have gone “missing”.
The decision comes after repeated red flags by a Parliamentary Committee as well as criticism from the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister.
Citing a performance audit of the CAG which had included a joint physical inspection along with the Archaeological Survey of India of over 1,655 monuments and sites, the Rajya Sabha Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture had said that it was “perturbed” to find that the Barakhamba Cemetery in the very heart of the capital city was among the untraceable monuments.
Minister of Culture G. Kishan Reddy informed the Rajya Sabha on Thursday that the performance audit report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India in 2013 had stated that 92 protected monuments were missing. However, ASI has traced 68 monuments and 24 are not yet traced.
Some of the other missing monuments besides the Barakhamba Cemetery include ruins of a temple circle at Uttar Pradesh’s Mirzapur dating to 1000 AD, two Kos Minars – one at Faridabad’s Mujesar and another at Kurukshetra’s Shahabad, a 12th century temple at Rajasthan’s Baran and the Inchla Wali Gumti at Mubarakpur Kotla in the capital.
The Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister has also in a report last month said there was an urgent need to “rationalise” the list of monuments of national importance. It had asked the ASI to evolve substantive criteria and a detailed procedure for declaring monuments to be of national importance.
The council had said that the ASI should periodically review and rationalise the existing list by evolving criteria taking a leaf out of the operational guidelines for the selection of UNESCO world heritage sites.
There are at present 3,693 centrally-protected monuments and sites in the country.
Sources in the Culture Ministry said that the committee would be formed of internal experts of the ASI and would be headed in all probability by the Director General of the ASI. It would survey the missing 24 monuments and certify them as ‘found’ or ‘not found’.
In case a monument is ‘not found’, then a process would be initiated to denotify them through the parliamentary procedure, sources said.
The sources said that the challenges facing the committee would be identifying the geographical indications and markings which are as old as the 1920s and most have since then disappeared.
A case in point is the Barakhamba Cemetary, which in the 1920s notification is said to be in the Imperial City, surrounded by railway lines on all sides, the ASI official says, pointing out the location could be both near New Delhi and Nizamuddin as apart from railway stations, both have records of the presence of Barakhamba or 12 pillars.
