We will make sure that all UNESCO World Heritage Sites in India have facilities of international standard… we intend to expand support for protecting cultural/linguistic heritage, conserving sites of ecological/historical importance.

The 2019 Sankalp Patra makes two heritage commitments that can be measured. On tourism it says: "We will make sure that all UNESCO World Heritage Sites in India have facilities of international standard." Under cultural heritage it says the party intends "to expand support for protecting cultural/linguistic heritage, conserving sites of ecological/historical importance".

Some of that visibly happened. India added World Heritage inscriptions during the term, and new museums opened. Those are real and this fact-check does not dispute them.

What the CAG examined is the machinery underneath — and it did so in a particular way. Report No. 10 of 2022, tabled on 8 August 2022, is not a fresh audit but a follow-up: it went back to the findings of the 2013 performance audit on preservation and conservation of monuments, and to the 25 recommendations the Public Accounts Committee made on them, and asked what had been done. That framing matters, because the answer to most of the questions is: the same thing as before.

Start with the inventory, since you cannot protect what you have not listed. The National Mission on Monuments and Antiquities was launched in 2007 to build a national database in five years, extended for another five, then folded into the Archaeological Survey of India. The audit's count: "Out of 4 lakh plus heritage structures and 58 lakh plus antiquities, only 1.84 lakh monuments and 16.83 lakh antiquities have been documented so far."

Then the legal shield. Heritage bye-laws define what may be built in the prohibited and regulated area around a monument — the instrument that stops encroachment before it starts. "Out of 3693 Centrally Protected Monuments, HBL for only 31 monuments have been notified", with 210 more somewhere in the pipeline. Eleven years after the National Monument Authority was created to write them.

The institution itself was running without a plan or a quorum. "ASI had no strategy or road-map (long term/medium term) to fulfill its mandate. The conservation activities were being undertaken on ad-hoc/annual basis." Its apex advisory body, the Central Advisory Board on Archaeology, "was inactive after March 2018 and had only one meeting during 2014-18". And on encroachment specifically — the thing the bye-laws exist to prevent — "no coordination and monitoring mechanism was established at Central or Circle levels".

Two findings go to whether the promise to "expand support" translated into resources. Staffing did not: "overall vacancy position of ASI had remained static at 29 per cent since earlier audit", and worse at management level and in the conservation branches. Nor did the archaeology budget: the ministry had told the Public Accounts Committee it would raise exploration and excavation spending to five per cent of the total, and the audit found it "still less than one per cent". Private money did not fill the gap either — the National Culture Fund had grown to ₹76 crore by March 2021 and used "less than 14 per cent" of it for its purposes.

One exchange in the report is worth quoting for what it says about the relationship between the auditee and its overseers. The committee had asked for guidelines on what makes a monument nationally important, followed by a survey to establish how many monuments can actually be protected. The audit found no guidelines and no survey, and records the reply: "Ministry/ASI informed that taking of survey is an ongoing phenomenon and the view of PAC was not relevant/possible to be implemented."

New inscriptions and new museums are the visible end of heritage policy. The audited record shows the invisible end — the list, the bye-laws, the staff, the plan — largely where the 2013 audit left it. Our verdict is lacks context.