The Hindu : New Delhi News : `Foreign hand' at excavation sites

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Oct 16, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

`Foreign hand' at excavation sites

By Mandira Nayar

NEW DELHI, OCT. 15. India has now moved from marketing its diversity as a tourist destination to selling its history. Literally. The price of getting hands-on-experience to be an amateur archaeologist on an excavation site dating back to Paleolithic times in Tamil Nadu is less than 2,000 US dollars, roughly the amount spent on buying a big screen television.

The need for any sort of professional experience is not required and those interested in India's own version of the Jurassic Park experience can send an e-mail to Earthwatch Institute's website. The share of cost for the round trip is tax deductible for US citizens in some cases. Indians don't even figure in the picture except as labourers.

A completely new dimension to globalisation, this is a `foreign hand' that probably did not feature even in the worst nightmares of the Left. Not a `swadeshi' issue either as collaborations with foreign experts are important as at least the reports get written unlike the excavations carried out by the ASI which are still waiting to be printed, but more importantly it is about taking history lightly. Surprisingly, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) seems to be completely clueless about the situation is deliberately turning a blind eye to it.

While the Standing Committee of the Centralised Advisory Board -- which approves the proposals for all the excavations including those conducted by universities or private institutions across the country each year -- cleared the Attirampakkam site in Tamil Nadu, the members were blissfully unaware that this Paleolithic site was being used as a tourist destination.

Any research scholar or foreign expert need to be cleared both by the Ministry of Home as well as External Affairs, but in this case the website seems to only require a health certificate and a telephone interview, clearly hinting that the people assisting on the dig do not have the valid paperwork.

"No other country in the world allows foreigners to be part of an archaeological dig without the required professional qualifications and a research visa. An excavation site is not a tourist destination. I think the archaeologist should be blacklisted and banned from the profession. It is complete marketing of the India's past. Are we really willing to sell our heritage for a few dollars?'' asked a retired ASI director.

Unfortunately, Attirampakkam is not the only case which seems to have escaped the attention of the ASI. In another example, a proposal for excavation at Gilund in Rajasthan, which was rejected by the Standing Committee last year, was `mysteriously' given permission less than six months later. While that raises serious doubts about the credibility of ASI officials, it also exposes the complete lack of control the ASI seems to have on excavations across the country.

However, the story of Gilund is far from over. The `permission' was given to a professor from Deccan College and a foreign scholar, but surprisingly a completely different foreign expert was given the approval by the Ministry of Human Resource and Development to undertake the excavation in Gilund in March 2004.

With no real systematic approach to getting permission, it seems that a few people seem to be exploiting these loopholes for profit. The lack of checks by the ASI to ensure that excavations are conducted professionally or monitor them makes the rules easier to break. "This is a systematic racket taking place to ensure that suspicious excavations are carried out in the country. The proposal usually has a senior archaeologist as the director of excavations. But he never comes to the site. Someone else does the work and the ASI has no clue what is happening at the site. Samples are often sent out of the country to be dated, no one knows what happens to them. The ASI does not ensure that its own the excavation team submit periodic reports and those submitted keep piling up,'' sources in the Department of Culture stated.

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