The crisis: a national record without protection

Pakistan holds six properties on the World Heritage List. Behind them stands a national inventory of roughly 6,200 catalogued heritage places — and 5,516 of them, 89.0%, carry no identified legal protection at all. That is the emergency this platform exists to document. (PWHI analysis on PWHI data; protection counted only where an instrument is identified.)

Protection is attributed to the Antiquities Act 1975 (390), the Punjab Special Premises (Preservation) Ordinance 1985 (226), the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Antiquities Act 2016 (25), the AJK antiquities law (24), the Sindh Cultural Heritage (Preservation) Act 1994 (8), the Punjab Heritage Foundation Act 2005 (6), Karachi Building & Town Planning Regulations (2), the Quaid-i-Azam’s Mazar Ordinance (1) and 2 recorded only as “protected”. Protection status is treated as unverified for any site unless an identifiable statute or gazette notification is confirmed.

What the gap means on the ground

The districts carrying the heaviest unprotected load: Bahawalpur 368, Karachi 338, Layyah 236, Mardan 235, Lower Dir 188, Mansehra 175. Detection failure is the pattern: at Taxila — the most internationally scrutinised property in the country — the alarm in March 2026 was raised not by any monitoring system but by a member of the public with a camera. Whatever is happening at the 89% that carry no protection, no monitoring and no visitors of that kind is, by definition, not being detected at all.