DDA + INTACH heritage push

Delhi’s development authority is trying something unusually coherent with the Ridge. It is not just repairing old stones. It is building a way for people to move through the landscape and then trying to map the landscape well enough to protect it. In early April, the Delhi Development Authority signed a memorandum of understanding with INTACH, the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, to document historic structures across the Delhi Ridge, classify them, and turn that work into heritage trails and on-site signage. Reports on the agreement describe the Ridge as nearly 8,000 hectares spread across four zones, from the northern Ridge to the southern stretches around Mehrauli and Sanjay Van. More than 1,700 structures are expected to be geo-tagged and taken into a formal inventory. The point is simple. A ruin that is mapped, named, and placed inside a system is harder to ignore. That matters because the Ridge is not just another green patch on Delhi’s map. It is the northern edge of the Aravalli system, the old rocky spine that cuts through the capital and helps blunt hot desert winds. Delhi Tourism calls it the city’s “lungs.” The 2021 Master Plan puts the Ridge at 7,777 hectares, and recent reporting rounds that to nearly 8,000. The terrain is split across the Northern, Central, South Central, and Southern Ridge, and it has been under pressure for years from encroachment, infrastructure demands, and overlapping official control. The Supreme Court pushed for a stronger Delhi Ridge Management Board in late 2025 for exactly that reason. Protection has long existed on paper. The harder part has been making the place legible enough to defend. That is where the heritage survey becomes more than a culture project. The DDA says the INTACH partnership will create a comprehensive inventory of lesser-known structures scattered through the Ridge. That includes listing, classification, and the development of trails that connect monuments to the terrain around them. Geo-tagging sounds bureaucratic, but it changes the scale of the task. It turns fragments in scrub forest into fixed points that planners, conservators, and the public can all see on the same map. Once a structure is pinned to coordinates, photographed, and described, neglect becomes easier to measure and harder to disguise. The public-facing side of this effort is already visible. The DDA has been running curated walks, including one promoted as “Sufis, Sultans & Settlers,” and has announced another Ridge walk at Sanjay Van for April 11 called “Sanjay Van: Where Nature Meets History.” Those events are not decoration around the real work. They are part of the real work. A trail is a conservation tool when it teaches visitors that a forested hill also contains tombs, wells, walls, and settlement traces. If officials want political room to preserve a difficult landscape, they need residents to see the Ridge as more than vacant land with trees on it. The agency has been moving in that direction for at least a year. In March 2025, DDA-restored historic structures at Sanjay Van were publicly unveiled, including two old structures and a well revived inside one of south Delhi’s best-known wooded spaces. Reports on that restoration stressed that the work was done without stripping away the site’s ecological character. That detail is the real clue to what is happening now. Delhi’s authorities are starting to treat the Ridge as a single problem with two faces: habitat and history. The MoU with INTACH gives them a way to count both. The walks give them a way to show both. And the next public proof of that idea is scheduled to begin at 9:30 in the morning, at Gate No. 3 of Sanjay Van.