HRIDAY Reflections, a monograph on the Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yogana, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India

Curators/editors: Jigna Desai, Gurmeet Rai and Rutul Joshi (ICOMOS and CEPT Press) (2017)

This monograph is a curation of reflections on the Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojana, a program conceptualised, funded, and regulated by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), Government of India.  HRIDAY is a unique infrastructure development program that not only places cultural heritage at its center, but also acknowledges the need to involve local and grounded issues of community, infrastructure, and governance.  As a pilot, this scheme selected twelve heritage cities that are culturally diverse and geographically spread all over the country.  It supports the development of physical, social, economic, and institutional infrastructure in these cities.  The content of the monograph is divided into three parts. 

The first part delivers experts’ voices that elaborate upon positions that have been triggered from the questions embedded within HRIDAY.  The voices are a call to expand and deepen the history, heritage and conservation discourses beyond the divide of ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’, beyond the boundaries of a particular professional practise and beyond the limits of roles, rules, and regulations.  The second part includes the selected aspects of the City Hriday Plans (CHP) prepared by the anchor agencies and studies undertaken by the students on HRIDAY Cities at the graduate level of Conservation, Urban Design, Faculty of Architecture, and Faculty of Planning at CEPT University.  The last part of the monograph provides critical feedback and a way forward from multiple perspectives that brings forth the challenges faced by the professional at the time of implementation.

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