Home > Pakistan News & Library > Rohtas Fort in danger
 IT is baffling how the Punjab government could have approved a road project that will put a heritage site in harm’s way. The Rohtas Fort, near the city of Jhelum, is not unknown, and there are laws providing for the preservation of such historical sites. The 16th-century Muslim military marvel, which is said to have had a profound influence on the development of architectural styles in the Mughal empire and, by extension, on European colonial architecture is not only protected under the 1972 Unesco World Heritage Convention to which we are a signatory.
The monument is also protected under the 1975 Federal Antiquities Act, as well as by subsequent provincial heritage preserva-tion legislation and rules. After Rohtas Fort was put on Unesco’s heritage list in 1997, a joint federal government–Unesco programme was conceived to restore and preserve it. In 2006, a newly established museum at the fort was inaugurated.
The road which the Punjab government is said to have planned runs from Rohtas to Chakwal and is bound to encourage the general use of the road passing through the fort. This will result in encroachments associated with a major thoroughfare, in addition to the present ones. The Supreme Court had ordered the removal of these encroachments two months ago but to no avail. These encroachments, and the fact that the road was not originally planned to avoid traffic going through the fort, are indications of the weak enforcement of existing laws on heritage preservation. Getting the road plan changed and removing the existing encroachments is the easy part. It would be far more difficult to ensure that such kind of development activity, that is detrimental to the conservation of the fort, or any other protected site for that matter, does not take place again.
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