Sambalpur: Art historian Sa-sanka Sekhar Panda has written to L.K. Gupta, the principal director, architectural heritage division of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (Intach), New Delhi, requesting him not to go for a fresh survey of the upper Mahanadi valley as he had already done the same survey about six years ago.

Panda, who retired as additional secretary in the state information and public relations department, said he had extensively surveyed and documented more than 100 ancient temples and temple ruins in the upper Mahanadi valley of Odisha under the guidance of Pramod Chandra, an art historian with Harvard University.

Before that, ancient temples and temple ruins of the upper Mahanadi valley was also surveyed by the late Prabodh Kumar Mishra, the then head of the department of history, Sambalpur University, in 1985. The survey was funded by Ford Foundation.

"The temples and temple sites have already been surveyed and published. So, this new survey will be nothing but a wasteful financial exercise by Intach," Panda wrote in his letter. He claimed to have documented temples and temple ruins in the upper Mahanadi valley which is spread across Sambalpur, Balangir, Deogarh, Sundergarh, Bargarh, Jharsuguda, Sonepur, Boudh, Kalahandi, Nuapada and Angul.

The outcome is a book in two volumes containing more than 600 pages and about 900 photographs.

The book - Sculptural Art of the Upper Mahanadi Valley - was published by Pratibha Prakashan, New Delhi, and was released by chief minister Naveen Patnaik in 2012. This book is regarded as a magnum opus in the field of temple art and architecture and has got a place of pride in all the major universities and museums of Europe and America, he wrote in his letter.

The work was widely appreciated all over the world and Panda was invited by the University of Virginia, USA, to teach temple art of India to university students there for two years between 1996 and 1998.

On January 15 this year, Gupta flagged off the survey at an event near Samaleswari temple in Sambalpur town in the presence of state convenor of Intach A.B. Tripathy and Sambalpur Raseswari Panigrahi.