New Delhi, Mar 30 (PTI) A CAG report for the year ended March 2024 has flagged instances of “inappropriate” conservation work, structural “alterations”, and neglected monuments of national importance in its audit of ASI sites in Uttar Pradesh, according to an official statement issued on Monday.
The audit body has also pointed out that antiquities were stored in “deteriorating conditions and only 20 per cent had been digitised so far”.
Report No. 36 of 2025 of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India for the year ended March 2024, Union Government (Compliance Audit – Civil & Commercial) was tabled in Parliament on Monday, it said.
The report covers significant audit findings arising from the “compliance audit” of financial transactions relating to 29 ministries (excluding Union Territories without legislatures) and five constitutional bodies of the secretariat of the Union government.
The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) is a central government agency under the purview of the culture ministry and is responsible for protecting and maintaining monuments and archaeological sites that have been declared of national importance.
Subject Specific Compliance Audit (SSCA) on conservation and preservation of monuments and antiquities by the ASI in Uttar Pradesh, revealed that the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958 (AMASR Act) established “national importance” as the basis for notification, but “did not define its scope or provide standards for implementation,” the CAG said in the statement.
Notifications were “incomplete and lacked vital information,” it flagged.
“About 86 per cent of the notifications lacked the detail of the area/boundary covered by the Centrally Protected Monuments (CPMs),” the audit body said Also, instances of “inappropriate conservation work, monuments in need of chemical conservation, structural alterations, and neglected monuments of national importance were noticed,” the statement said.
The audit further noticed that out of 487 CPMs across three major ASI circles in Uttar Pradesh, “only 31 monuments (6.4 per cent) had proper ownership documentation through land record mutation”.
The ASI was “operating 456 CPMs (94 per cent) without legal title. As per the records of the ASI circles in UP, 31 CPMs remain untraceable,” it flagged.
In 96 monuments, cases of “encroachment” were reported in respective circles of ASI in Uttar Pradesh, the statement said.
According to a list of ASI sites shared by the Ministry of Culture in a written response to a query in Lok Sabha on December 2, 2024, the total number of ASI sites in Uttar Pradesh then stood at 743. PTI KND RHL
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