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 a coffee table book covering 23 sites across five eras, Pillars of Delhi: A Brief History of Delhi Through the Lens of Architecture, 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. The first step in preventing and solving damage is identifying the scale and nature of this damage. This is a platform that turns passive visitors into active documenters, and aims to transform documentation into accountability.
Moving from 23 to 32 sites
The platform initially launched with the 23 sites featured in the coffee table book. A conversation with Swapna Liddle, Convenor of INTACH Delhi and one of India's foremost historians of the city, significantly expanded its scope.
Swapna Liddle recommended cross-referencing the platform's site list with the Master Plan of Delhi 2041, published by INTACH. The plan identifies heritage sites of critical conservation concern. This exercise revealed 12 additional sites that warranted documentation and community monitoring. Many were lesser-known but equally vulnerable to neglect.
With Swapna Liddle's guidance, we added these sites to Heritage Atlas Delhi. They ranged from the 13th-century Tomb of Sultan Ghari to the Sultanate-era Begampuri Masjid. This expanded the platform's scope and strengthened its foundation in established heritage research.
A subsequent conversation with Vikramjit Singh Rooprai prompted further revisions. He suggested that some modern monuments included in the coffee table book were less relevant to the platform's conservation objectives. Following his advice, we removed three monuments and reordered the list. This brought the total to 32 sites.
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. The platform's coverage was later refined to 32 sites following expert guidance.
The 32 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.