Kolkata's Dalhousie Square was among one of the first projects in the country to have received a grant of $75,000 from American Express, one of the sponsors of the World Monuments Fund. |
Under the project, the 55 heritage buildings listed by the state government would be restored according to their needs, Mark Weber, technical director of World Monuments Fund (WMF), said. |
A master management plan would be drafted taking into account the needs of the area in about one to two years, said Weber. |
Weber said Kolkata's Dalhousie was one of its kind with the restoration challenges similar to those faced by the historic city of Pompeii or regenerating the Ground Zero region in New York. |
Weber admitted that the total cost of restoration of Kolkata's Dalhousie could run into millions of dollars and the grant was a token amount to kickstart the pilot project. |
The challenge in urban areas like Dalhousie Square was to artfully merge the static part of the city comprising old architectural works, with the kinetic part which had grown over the years thanks to modernisation, through a combination of restoration but regeneration processes to revive consciousness about the urban heritage, Rahul Mehrotra, director of Urban Design Research Institute, Mumbai, said. |
India has 15 sites out of a list of 100 Most Endangered Sites compiled by WMF, a New York-based non profit organisation, as part of its World Monuments Watch (WMW) initiative. |
GMW was a global listing of heritage sites in danger owing to physical decay or confusing mix of activity. |
The 15 sites have been listed over a period of ten years since its inception in 1996, with the list being reviewed every alternate year. |
The sites range from the Taj Mahal, Jaisalmer Fort, the walled city in Ahmedabad to the city area of Dalhousie Square listed in 2004 and 2006, said Weber at a stakeholders workshop organised at the Bengal Chamber of Commerce by the department of information and cultural affairs of the government of West Bengal, Action Research in Conservation of Heritage (ARCH) and the local chapter of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), on 'Conserving, improving & managing the historic city centre of Dalhousie Square'. |
"The funds for Kolkata will be utilised towards the stakeholder programme and the pilot facade restoration project of the Standard Assurance building in the square," said Manish Chakraborti of ARCH. |
Besides Dalhousie Square, the 2006 list included one of the earliest examples of cast iron architecture in Mumbai at Watson's Hotel, Dhangkar Gompa in Himachal Pradesh and Guru Lhakhang and Sumda Chung Temples in Sumda Chung. |
At Jaisalmer Fort, for example, work was underway after the completion of the plan with an initial grant of $500 million matched by the central government. |