50 centrally protected monuments ‘missing’: Govt

The missing monuments include 11 that were in Uttar Pradesh, as well as two each in Delhi and Haryana. The list also included monuments in Assam, West Bengal, Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

As per the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), 14 of these monuments have been lost to rapid urbanisation, 12 are submerged by reservoirs or dams, and the locations of the remaining 24 remain untraceable.

“Many such cases pertain to inscriptions and tablets, which don’t have a fixed address. They could have been moved or damaged, and it may be difficult to locate them,” officials told The Sunday Express. They also said that a bulk of the centrally protected monuments were identified in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, and that in the decades after Independence, “the focus was on discovering new monuments than on conserving them.”

“Also, the priorities of successive governments in a newly independent nation were health and development, even as heritage was ignored,” officials told The Sunday Express, adding that “even now, they are grappling with an acute manpower shortage to physically man all the big and small monuments which may fall under a particular region”.

It was in 2013 that the Comptroller and Auditor General had declared 92 monuments as “missing” after a first-of-its-kind physical verification exercise undertaken after Independence.

The Parliamentary Committee noted that “out of the 92 monuments declared as missing by CAG, 42 have been identified due to efforts made by the ASI”, but from the remaining list of 50 monuments, “14 are affected by rapid urbanisation, 12 are submerged by reservoir/dams while the location of the remaining 24 is still untraceable”.

The panel also came down heavily on the distinction made by the ministry regarding the monuments lost to urbanisation/reservoirs, and 24 monuments which are untraceable, as “an academic distinction since monuments lost to urbanisation/reservoirs are also irrecoverable”.

Importantly, the CAG audit included a joint physical inspection, along with ASI, of just 1,655 monuments and sites out of the 3,678 centrally protected monuments nationwide. The 24 monuments reported to be untraceable are from this sample of 1,655 monuments.