India Has 3,696 Centrally Protected Monuments. An Untapped Opportunity for Corporate CSR.
The Archaeological Survey of India protects roughly 3,695–3,698 centrally protected monuments and sites across the country, including 24 cultural World Heritage sites, per ASI’s own published figures and a December 2024 government reply in the Rajya Sabha. Government allocation for their conservation was reported at Rs 313.43 crore in FY 2024-25, down from Rs 443.53 crore the year before. Schedule VII, Category (v) explicitly permits CSR spend on protection of national heritage, art and culture, restoration of buildings and sites of historical importance, works of art, public libraries, and traditional arts and handicrafts. Across BlueSkyCSR’s portfolio of assessed projects this year, and across most CSR portfolios nationally, this category records close to zero.
The reasons are structural. Heritage outcomes are harder to reduce to a single reportable number than a vaccination count or a placement rate. A restored stepwell or a stabilised fort wall does not produce a beneficiary headcount in the way a health camp does. Conservation work under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958 remains the exclusive technical mandate of the ASI, which limits how directly a corporate donor can engage with – a friction that categories like education or healthcare do not carry in the same way.
The Adopt a Heritage 2.0 scheme, relaunched by the ASI and Ministry of Culture in September 2023, was built specifically to solve this: it channels CSR funding into visitor-facing amenities, hygiene, accessibility, safety, and knowledge infrastructure at monuments, while leaving conservation itself to the ASI. Companies designated ‘Monument Mitras’ fund benches, signage, accessible pathways, lighting, and interpretation centres. The National Cultural Fund, established in 1996 specifically to mobilise private resources for heritage, remains the formal channel for donations earmarked toward specific monuments.
What makes heritage CSR measurable, for companies willing to look past the headcount metric:
- Structural condition assessments at defined intervals, not just a one-time restoration announcement.
- Visitor accessibility and safety indicators before and after intervention.
- Livelihood outcomes for traditional craftspeople and artisans engaged in restoration or interpretation work.
- Footfall and dwell-time data as a secondary indicator, not the primary claim of impact.
For companies with a genuine regional footprint near heritage sites, whether through tourism-adjacent business, a factory near a historic town, or CSR geography that already overlaps a monument cluster, Category (v) is a meaningfully underfunded, legally explicit CSR avenue that most peers are not yet competing in.
The opportunity under Category (v) is not to find another CSR theme to fund, but to recognise one that has been sitting in Schedule VII all along. With the right programme design and measures of impact, heritage can become a credible and valuable part of a company’s CSR portfolio.BlueSkyCSR helps companies design and assess heritage and cultural CSR programmes with the same rigour applied to any other Schedule VII category.
