India has 500,000 heritage structures — and protects fewer than 1% of them. What happens to everything else?
In this urgent and deeply personal conversation, conservation architect Anuradha Naik and Malini Thadani of the World Monuments Fund trace the fragile thread connecting India’s monuments to its collective memory — and to the communities whose identity, livelihood, and dignity are woven into crumbling stone and forgotten craft.
From a rickshaw-puller bringing his grandson to see his childhood neighbourhood in a palace photograph, to a retired lawyer single-handedly saving a 400-year-old Hyderabad gateway from a lorry, to a master Bidri painter who earns more guarding a bank than practising his irreplaceable art — these stories reveal that India’s heritage crisis is not bureaucratic. It is personal.
The speakers make the case that 98% of India’s artisans carry their knowledge solely in oral tradition and muscle memory, that traditional lime buildings outlast modern concrete by centuries with a fraction of the carbon footprint, and that a city’s beauty and history are statistically proven drivers of its economic growth.
Heritage, they argue, is not India’s past. It is its most endangered future.

About the Speakers:
Malini Thadani is the Executive Director of World Monuments Fund India and a sustainability leader who serves as an independent director on several corporate and nonprofit boards, helping organizations integrate sustainability into their strategic vision.
Anuradha S. Naik is a UNESCO award-winning conservation architect, award-winning author, and Principal at Anuradha Naik Associates, Hyderabad. She has worked on major projects in the UK and in India.

Moderator:
Brijeshwari Kumari Gohil is a curator and conservator working in the field of art and heritage, currently collaborating with artisans to promote and preserve the region’s cultural and natural heritage.