India currently has 3,695 Monuments of National Importance (MNIs) that are managed by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958. The majority of these were inherited from a colonial-era list of protected monuments, along with a few hundred others from the princely states. Some changes have been made over the decades, but there was no systematic attempt to rationalise the list, that is until now.
In our EAC-PM report titled ‘Monuments of National Importance: An Urgent Need for Rationalization’ (https://ln.run/tNqeU), published in January 2023, we pointed out that there were many monuments that were simply missing or were unworthy of being on the list of ‘national monuments’. The issue of missing monuments has also been raised in Parliament several times. On March 8 this year, ASI issued a gazette notification to delist 18 monuments that have not been found despite years of effort. Suggestions and objections by the public were sought within two months. Now that two months have elapsed, the final notification is awaited. This is the first attempt to delist missing monuments since 1978.
However, there is an equally important problem with monuments that are unworthy of being deemed of national importance. While some of........