It started with a book
In Grade 10, Arnav Agarwal spent months visiting Delhi's heritage sites — photographing them, researching their architectural history, and writing about the civilisations that built them. The result was Pillars of Delhi: A Brief History of Delhi Through the Lens of Architecture — a coffee table book covering 23 sites across five eras, published and available on Amazon.
While researching the book, Arnav noticed something that no archive or database captured: the quiet, daily damage being done to these sites by public apathy. Visitors carving names into ancient sandstone. Rubbish piled at the base of 700-year-old walls. People climbing structures that had survived centuries only to be damaged in minutes.
Heritage Atlas Delhi is the answer to that observation — a platform that turns passive visitors into active documenters, and turns documentation into accountability.
From 23 to 35 sites — with expert guidance
The platform launched with the 23 sites from Arnav's coffee table book. But a conversation with Swapna Liddle — Convenor of INTACH Delhi and one of India's foremost historians of the city — changed its scope significantly.
Swapna Liddle recommended cross-referencing the platform's site list against the Master Plan of Delhi 2041, published by INTACH, which identifies heritage sites of critical conservation concern. The exercise identified 12 additional sites — many lesser-known but equally at risk — that deserved documentation and community monitoring.
These 12 sites, ranging from the 13th-century Tomb of Sultan Ghari to the Sultanate-era Begumpuri Masjid, were added to Heritage Atlas Delhi with Swapna Liddle's guidance, expanding the platform from a personal project into an institutionally grounded heritage conservation tool.
Pillars of Delhi
The platform is seeded by Arnav's published research — not scraped data or generated content. Every site page draws on the historical narratives, architectural analysis, and original photography from the book. 12 additional sites, identified with guidance from Swapna Liddle using the INTACH Master Plan of Delhi 2041, extend the platform's coverage to 35 sites in total.
The 35 sites span five eras of Delhi's history:
From awareness to action
Heritage Atlas Delhi operates on a simple chain of logic — educate, document, verify, share.
Civic tech, community mapping & PPGIS
Heritage Atlas Delhi sits at the intersection of three contemporary fields.
As an applied PPGIS experiment, the platform uses geographic information systems to broaden public involvement in heritage protection — overlaying community-reported data with institutional records to produce a spatial picture that neither source could create alone. PPGIS is defined as the use of GIS to broaden public involvement in policymaking and to promote the goals of nongovernmental organisations and community-based groups. Heritage Atlas Delhi meets this definition directly.
As a Civic Technology project, it uses digital tools to enable citizen engagement with a public interest problem. As a Community Mapping initiative, it builds a spatially organised, community-generated dataset of heritage site conditions that did not previously exist.
Who's behind this
Help protect Delhi's heritage
Every report matters. Spotted harmful behaviour at a heritage site? Document it in under 2 minutes — no account needed.