ASI's Director General ordered to appear in person before the Supreme Court and explain why 173 Protected Monuments got zero official attention

In a stinging indictment of bureaucratic indifference toward India's irreplaceable heritage, the Supreme Court trained its sights on the Archaeological Survey of India, issuing a show-cause contempt notice directly to its Director General after the country's premier heritage body failed to file even a basic affidavit on the condition of 173 ASI-protected monuments across Delhi, a silence the Court refused to treat as anything less than deliberate defiance of its own orders.

The controversy traces back to the Court's earlier intervention on February 2, 2026, when it had directed multiple agencies, the ASI, the Delhi government's Department of Archaeology, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, and the New Delhi Municipal Corporation, to submit structured status reports on the condition and maintenance of hundreds of heritage monuments falling under their respective jurisdictions. Court Commissioner Mr. Gopal Sankaranarayanan placed a consolidated summary before the bench today, and what it revealed was a patchwork of incomplete surveys, missing geo-mapping data, absent photographs, and vague compliance claims across the board. Of the 85 MCD monuments, only 62 had been surveyed at all. Of the 54 NDMC monuments, a staggering 52 remained entirely uninspected.

The Delhi government's archaeology department, while faring marginally better on its 19 monuments, offered only broad generalised assertions of compliance, precisely the kind of paper-thin response the Court had sought to move beyond.

The bench was unsparing in its assessment of what it saw on the record. Reserving its sharpest response for the ASI's complete non-compliance, the Court took the extraordinary step of issuing a personal contempt show-cause notice to the Director General, directing him to appear in person on the next date of hearing, with his response in hand. The order recorded that "the Court takes strong exception to the deliberate violation of the order of this Court," leaving no ambiguity about how the bench characterised the ASI's silence.

For the remaining agencies, the Court issued a sweeping direction mandating fresh, monument-wise affidavits covering every issue flagged in the February order, with mandatory geo-tagged location data and current photographs for each site, all to be served on the Court Commissioner and senior petitioner's counsel by April 10, 2026.

The NDMC, despite its near-total survey failure, was assigned an expanded coordination role and directed to submit a detailed scheme outlining how it intends to discharge supervisory responsibility across all agencies. The matter has been listed for April 13, 2026.