Will Delhi, or any other city, learn from the Ahmedabad experience of balancing heritage with development?
Hunting for answers was a team of experts from across the country -- members of the National Monument Authority (NMA), director of the School of Planning and Architecture (Bhopal), representatives from the Indian National Trust for Arts and Culture (INTACH) and officials of the Archaeological Survey of India - as they tried to put in place a set of heritage bylaws as part of NMA's advisory group.
Experts on the advisory group, which met for the first time on Tuesday, deliberated on how the Ahmedabad experience could be made useful for framing heritage bylaws. Earlier a team from Ahmedabad - the city had earned a place on UNESCO's tentative list of World Heritage City last year, ahead of Delhi - had made a presentation on mapping its monuments.
The authorities are required to prepare monument specific heritage bylaws - necessitated after Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains (Amendment and Validation) Act 2010 was put in place in March 2010. Delhi has as many as 174 monuments that are protected by the Archaeological Survey of India.