LAHORE, Aug 13: A federal archaeology department’s official at a recently-held meeting in Islamabad opposed the move to transfer its monuments to the provinces.

A six-member committee, which was constituted by the federal culture and tourism secretary last month to finalize the modalities regarding handing over all the federal archaeology department’s monuments to the provinces, met in Islamabad on Aug 9. The meeting was presided over by Prof Farid Khan of the Pak Heritage Society.

The committee comprises a member each from all the provincial and federal archaeology departments, and one from the ministry of culture and tourism. It will submit its report to the ministry within two months for action on its recommendations.

The member from the federal archaeology department suggested that the government, instead of handing over the monuments to the provinces, should transfer the monuments controlled by the provinces to the federal department for their better upkeep.

He said the federal archaeology department had all the technical staff like architects, engineers, excavators, anthropologists, curators and paper conservators, required to repair and maintain the monuments. Whereas the provincial archaeology departments had neither experts nor manpower to look after the monuments, he added.

The federal archaeology department, he said, was a signatory to the monuments on the World Heritage List, and, if these (monuments) were handed over to the provinces they might not deal with the donor agencies like Unesco in this regard.

The committee will work out all the modalities regarding the decentralization of the monuments, physical verification and identification of new sites.

It will also examine the Antiquity Act of 1975, the Punjab Special Premises Preservation Ordinance, the Sindh Cultural Heritage Preservation Act and the NWFP’s Antiquity Act to bring uniformity in these. The committees’s next meeting will be held in Quetta in the first week of the next month.

The body has been formed in the light of President Gen Pervez Musharraf’s directive issued in 2001 to ascertain whether or not the federal archaeology department’s monuments could be transferred to the provinces.

The federal archaeology department currently has 392 monuments — 149 monuments in the Punjab, 88 in the NWFP, 127 in Sindh and 28 in Balochistan —. The Punjab archaeology department has 244 monuments, including historic mosques and shrines, Sindh has few, and the NWFP and Balochistan have none under their control.