What even Lord Curzon reiterated that it is the elementary obligation of the government to conserve ancient monuments is a lesson lost on the political and social elite of the nation today. Vandals deface our tomb walls and slum dwellers threaten our forts, but our establishment is more interested in building monuments of the divisive kind even as its picture postcard sites fall about in disarray.

It is not the politician alone to blame. Sure, the only admirable aspect of the Nehru-Gandhi clan was that they understood the importance of our showpieces and tried to prevent them from being obliterated. It is equally the administrator's fault. Instead of installing a professional cadre and allowing them avenues of growth, the ASI has become yet another fiefdom for Indian Administrative Officers to exploit.

Otherwise would there be any reason for five of the six posts of directors in the ASI to be ad hoc appointments? Especially, when there are several professionally qualified archaeologists on the ASI rolls? What has happened to the Sun Temple today could equally happen to the Taj Mahal or even the Mahabalipuram temple tomorrow. The disrepair is a mirror of the ASI, where only 100 of the 3,597 monuments have been treated to exhaustive reports.

It is a reflection of the sad fact that in the one year of its existence, the highly innovative National Culture Fund has been able to attract less than Rs 2 crore in funding, that too only from the Taj group, the Pune Municipal Corporation and the Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh governments. It is also a sign of the priority given to culture in our lopsided society that the ASI's annual fund for repair of monuments is a measly Rs 20 crore.

Stones don't speak, so obviously no political regime would ever be interested in even trying to alter the structure of the ASI, not even Murli Manohar Joshi's Ministry of Human Resource Development which seems so concerned about the `distorted' study of history. And yet it is the ASI that has given the nation such eminent archaeologists as K.N. Dikshit, N.P. Chakravarti, and A. Ghosh. The ASI will say that it has started its effort to educate people about conservation don't scribble on heritage walls, don't treat sculptures as objects for souvenir hunting, don't touch any delicate marble work.

One is tempted to applaud it until one learns that part of this education process is a Rs 12 lakh film project which was littered with technical errors and marred by bad dubbing. Almost a century ago, John Marshall, who was appointed Director-General of the ASI by Lord Curzon, said: ``The future of archaeology in India must depend more and more on the degree of interest taken in it by Indians themselves.'' It's time we demanded better treatment for our monuments. They need to be protected from ASI, as it exists today. Surely even a majority of the 8,000-odd staff of ASI would agree.