Six Offices, No Custodian: Why Delhi's Lodhi Tombs Are Vanishing on Paper Before They Vanish on the Ground

A Tomb Nobody Holds: Zamrudpur and Delhi's Old Habit of Losing Monuments on Paper First In 1936, the

colonial administration in New Delhi took the scattered tombs of the Sayyid and Lodhi sultans and enclosed them within one landscaped estate, Lady Willingdon Park. The village that had grown up among the tombs was moved out.

It was a harsh answer, but it was a complete one: one authority drew one boundary and kept one record. That estate is today's Lodhi Garden, the best-kept cluster of fifteenth-century architecture in the city. Ninety years later, a few kilometres south, the Lodhi-era tombs of Zamrudpur show the opposite answer: many authorities, no boundary anyone will own and no record anyone can produce.

Six offices, one missing file The Supreme Court has been supervising these tombs through Rajeev Suri's petition.

The pattern of its hearings tells the real story.

• April 2026: The MCD's status report said a survey of five tombs found one in satisfactory condition and encroachment or littering around three others.
• August 2026: The court commissioners told the Bench there were five Grade-I heritage buildings in Zamrudpur under the MCD and one of them could not be traced. The Court called the MCD's stand on encroachment a suppression of facts.
• October 7, 2026: The Bench found the authorities still could not say who owns the sites, what the settlement records show or what the current position is. These are details that, in law, they are presumed to hold. That is the core of the problem. Nobody is actively destroying these tombs. The fault lies with the paperwork, because no single office treats the record as its own. The ASI protects monuments of national importance. The MCD, NDMC and DDA control the land, the drains and the building permissions around them. Delhi's Department of Archaeology handles state-level heritage. Each holds a piece of the responsibility and none holds the file. > A monument whose ownership, settlement and status no office can state is already half-encroached. The physical loss usually comes later.

This has happened before and here the parallel breaks This is not new.

In 2013, the CAG surveyed 1,655 centrally protected monuments and could not find 92 of them. By 2023, the Ministry of Culture told Parliament that 24 were still untraceable and 14 had been swallowed by urbanisation. In this same litigation, the Lodhi-era Gumti of Shaikh Ali in Defence Colony had been occupied by a residents' association since the 1960s.

The Court ordered it vacated only in 2025. Each time, the monument was lost first in the records and the encroachment followed. The 1936 comparison breaks down at the most important point. Lady Willingdon Park was coherent because a colonial state could clear a village by order and answer to nobody.

A democratic city cannot govern its heritage that way and should not. The coordination has to come from institutions, not from an imperial planner. That is why the Bench's proposal of a single senior officer to coordinate the bodies matters more than the summons.

It is the first attempt to give Zamrudpur what the system never created: a custodian of the record itself. For the exam, the lesson is that India's heritage problem is rarely a shortage of law. The AMASR Act, Article 49 and Article 51A(f) all exist.

The weak point is the gap between agencies, where a monument belongs to everyone on paper and to no one in practice.