Here are some statistics to set things up:
According to the 2011 census, India has close to 2 million homeless people.
The average square footage of living space per person in India is 103 sq ft. This is less than the size of an average prison cell in the US (Time of India article).
In 2021-22, India spent 27,000,00,000 (that's 27 thousand lakhs) to protect historical buildings? (India Times article).
There total amount of land under the Archeological Survey of India (ASI) is not known, but it is estimated to be in the thousands of hectares.
While I am as passionate about our heritage as the next guy, I cannot help but wonder why we continue to protect these useless buildings in the name of culture and history when living people cannot find space to live. Most of these monuments are built on some of the most habitable and centrally located lands. Imagine how much space can be made available to house people if we just got rid of these creaky, old buildings.
Most monuments of any import were built by the upper classes or the rich classes because only they could afford to build the kind of things that could either last long or had no day-to-day value. These buildings fall into broadly three categories:
Palaces or palatial homes
Places of worship
Commemoration of victories or events
Tombs or burial sites
Barring the last type of monuments, the other three, by their very nature, needed to be built in places where they could be seen by the most number of people. This meant that they were built on prime land. This was fine as long as the population was small and the demands on land was low. But today, in the name of protecting heritage, these monuments continue to take up prime land which leads to expansion of urban areas horizontally. This in turn leads to destruction of natural resources to expand these urban spaces to mostly house the poorest people. The rich and well-to-do can and do afford housing in more prime and accessible areas.
Any talk about pulling down these, mostly useless, structures, brings about cries and protests about protecting heritage from the rich and well-to-do. The real people don't really care if we protect a hundred-year-old building that has zero significance to their lives. They don't have the time or wherewithal to visit or appreciate these appendages of a time long since gone.
Another group that loves to hang on to these useless relics are politicians because they can use these to open perceived wounds. Just like an idol in a place of worship, although it may not represent the actual God in any provable way, serves to give the people something to focus their prayers up on, these monuments serve as a symbol around which they can build hate based on perceived slights. Let's be honest, a poor laborer doesn't really care which ruler looted which place of worship 500 years ago. She is worried that her child is suffering from diarrhea, doesn't have access to a good education, can't sleep safely at night behind a closed door. These monuments of man's greed for riches, power, and glory continue to oppress the less privileged by allowing those who lust for power today to focus on totally useless things while ignoring that which really matters.
It is so much easier to collect votes based on the hatred of the other than build institutions that will improve the lot of the less privileged - who are the real "other" in every story.
To those who would argue, and rightly so, that many of these monuments are a catalog of humankind's progress in engineering and art, I suggest we look to technology for the solution. It will be much easier and space-and-cost effective to make digital models of these monuments. These can be made available to the academics and general public over the internet. Digitizing these monuments would be a one-time cost, while trying to protect them is a recurring expense.
Our living spaces, like society and culture, are evolving spaces. Trying to freeze these in some arbitrary moment in time is foolhardy and dangerous.
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