Jagmohan: House snub

New Delhi, May 28: A parliamentary committee has slammed a Jagmohan-era plan to retrace the course of mythical river Saraswati just when the former culture minister had been lobbying the Manmohan Singh government to take a fresh look at his pet project.

The report of the committee, headed by CPM leader Sitaram Yechury, was tabled in the recent session of Parliament.

Just days before that, Jagmohan, the culture minister in the National Democratic Alliance government, had been busy persuading the Manmohan government to revive the stalled Saraswati Heritage Project.

Sources said he met tourism and culture minister Ambika Soni, asking her to get the ASI to take up more excavations on the supposed route of the river along which, some scholars insist, the Harrappan civilisation once spawned.

Jagmohan also wrote a lengthy letter to the Prime Minister suggesting that he should “intervene and ensure that the project is taken in the right perspective and revived”.

He said it could be stated with a fair degree of certainty that the Harrappan/Indus-Saraswati civilisation was born on Indian soil and “its people and the Vedic people were one and the same”.

The ambitious plan had been drawn up to excavate sites along the course the river supposedly meandered through centuries ago, and to develop museums and tourist infrastructure there.

Although the original Rs 36-crore plan envisaged excavating sites starting from Adi-Badri in Haryana to Dholavira in Gujarat, it was scaled down to a modest Rs 5 crore to excavate just a few sites.

Jagmohan faced the charge that the project was merely meant to further the “saffron agenda”. With the change of government at the Centre, the project was put on the backburner.

An ASI official told The Telegraph that the “three or four” excavations were over and the report of the findings would be written in the next few months. But he was reluctant to call these excavations a part of the grandiose Jagmohan scheme.

The Saraswati Heritage Project did not conform to the criterion fixed for such excavations as no academic body had recommended the project, the committee said.