About the initiative
One record, held to one standard
Pakistan's Heritage Digital Ecosystem is an independent civil-society project documenting the state of Pakistan's heritage — roughly 6,200 catalogued places, six World Heritage properties, twenty-nine Tentative List sites, four inscribed elements of living heritage — and the laws, institutions and pressures that decide what survives. It is not a government platform, and it is not affiliated with UNESCO or the Department of Archaeology and Museums. It exists because no comparable public record did.
Why this exists
Of the roughly 6,200 heritage places in the national inventory, about 89% carry no identified legal protection. In March 2026, the alarm over works at Taxila — the most internationally scrutinised property in the country — was raised not by any monitoring system but by a member of the public with a camera. In July 2026, Rohtas Fort became the second property in a month to face UNESCO scrutiny on the same question. The pattern is the argument: Pakistan's heritage is under-protected in law, under-monitored in practice, and under-documented in public. This ecosystem answers with the only tools available to civil society — a complete public record, kept honestly.
One ecosystem, four instruments
Where the record becomes action: heritage policy, the Legislative Matrix, Heritage Impact Assessment, climate and disaster resilience, advocacy campaigns, and the Heritage Intelligence engine. Moderated public deliberation opens here next.
Pakistan before UNESCO, in all four categories: the six inscribed cultural properties, the Tentative List, natural and mixed candidates, intangible heritage, Committee sessions, State of Conservation tracking, and the Taxila and Rohtas Watch files.
The spatial record: every catalogued place, searchable and mapped, each with its own permanent page — coordinates, legal status, typology, photographs, sources — and curated heritage trails for discovery.
The conservation archive in preparation: time-series photography, then-and-now comparisons, and moderated field submissions — so that physical change is documented, not merely remembered.
The four domains share one spine: the Atlas Site ID. Every
record in the national inventory has a stable ID, and /site/{id} on any
ecosystem domain resolves to that site's record. A photograph, a legal analysis, a UNESCO decision and a map
marker all attach to the same key.
The evidence rules
Every claim on every page carries its epistemic status, and the distinction is never blurred:
Established against a primary source: a UNESCO decision record, a statute or gazette notification, or the master registry itself.
Drawn from credible press or third-party reporting, attributed, and not independently confirmed by PWHI. Never presented as established fact.
Named as an open question: what is not yet known is stated, not papered over. Pages are updated as the record develops.
The same discipline binds the data: a site's legal protection is recorded as unverified unless an identifiable instrument is cited; coordinates are labelled source-provided, not field-verified until fieldwork confirms them; and the Heritage Intelligence engine answers only from its indexed corpus, cites what it retrieved, and abstains when the record cannot support an answer. Errors, when found, are corrected publicly — the corrections channel accepts challenges against any record ID.
Who runs this
The ecosystem was founded and architected by Khurram Chughtai, and operates as an independent civil-society initiative advised by JUSnREM. It takes no government funding, hosts no advertising, and represents no institution's position but its own. Where PWHI analysis appears alongside verified UNESCO or statutory text, it is labelled as PWHI analysis. Content is licensed CC BY 4.0 unless marked otherwise; DOAM inventory photographs are displayed from their official source and remain the department's.
The record so far
Catalogued places in the national registry — 684 with an identified legal instrument, 5,516 without (~89.0%).
World Heritage properties (1980–1997) and Tentative List sites, including the four added in 2026.
Inscribed elements of intangible heritage — two of them on UNESCO's Urgent Safeguarding List.
Items indexed by the Intelligence engine: the registry, 122 Committee decisions, 20 statutes.
Contact & corrections
Corrections against any record: corrections@pwhi.digital, quoting the Atlas Site ID. Institutional and press enquiries: via ksc.bio. Suggested citation for this ecosystem: Pakistan's Heritage Digital Ecosystem, pak-heritage.forum, retrieved [date].
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