It’s an ambitious effort to build a data base of India’s built heritage and antiquities and prevent both from gradually disappearing. An effort that got off to a slow start but now appears to be gathering steam.
In a sprawling, pristine white colonial bungalow in Lutyens Delhi that once housed the Belgian embassy, work is on to build a veritable treasure trove of data documenting India’s rich heritage of monuments, sites and antiquities. The gargantuan task of collating and building a comprehensive data base is part of the government’s ambitious National Mission on Monuments and Antiquities that was launched in 2007.
Making a slow beginning, the mission under the Union ministry of culture with a budget of `90 crore is now busy trying to make up for lost time and complete the task set before it. The year set for the completion of this important mission with the Archaeological Survey off India (ASI) as the nodal agency is 2012. However, it is learnt that “nothing was done” in the initial years of the Mission which came into being after it was decided that the proposed National Mission on Monuments and National Mission on Antiquities would be merged into one Mission.
Apart from building a data bank of the country’s precious built heritage as well as antiquities, the present mission is also aimed at conserving monuments that don’t come under the “protected” category and checking the illegal trade in antiquities.
In the case of antiquities — these could range from coins, sculptures, paintings, epigraphs to manuscripts, records and many other items — India has no record of its huge wealth except in cases where these are registered or are in museums.
So far, the mission has documented nearly 80,000 listings with information on unprotected built heritage and sites from secondary sources. A whopping 35,000 photo negatives of built heritage and sites have also been digitised. Another 3,50,000 antiquities have also been documented as part of the Mission. In the case of Punjab, all its antiquities have been documented.
Importantly, the mission isn’t just about collecting data on all that is ancient or very old as far as built structures are concerned. For, it has the wider ambit of building a data base on built heritage, structures constructed in the pre-Independence period and until 1950 — these can include houses, hawelis, bridges, etc. The reason for this being the colonial influence on the architecture in the pre-Independence period.