In a fresh lease of life for the city’s architectural history, the state government has initiated the much-delayed move to notify a revised heritage list for Mumbai. This would mean the inclusion of 900-odd additional structures to the existing list of 588 structures protected as heritage buildings. The government had sat on the list for over a year and a half now.

DK Afzalpurkar, chief of the Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee, confirmed that the government has asked the BMC commissioner to begin the process to notify all the new structures. “The BMC will be inviting suggestions and objections. The commissioner will then forward his comments to the government which will sanction the final list. The whole process will take about two months.”

The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Heritage Conservation Society (MMR-HCS) had, as early as 2005, taken up the task of revising the ten-year-old heritage list which was restricted to structures in South Mumbai. Besides structures of heritage value in the suburbs, the new list also recommends heritage listing for key open spaces, statues and bridges.

The MMR-HCS had submitted the final list to the heritage committee, by which time several structures had to be struck off the list as they were either demolished or altered in a way that they lost their unique features. These structures include thespian Dilip Kumar’s bungalow at Pali Hill, the Mantralaya building and many quaint bungalows spread across Bandra-Khar, Hindu Colony, Parsi Colony and Shivaji Park in Dadar. The heritage committee had fine-tuned the list further and forwarded it to the government.

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