Meet Parul Munjal, Who Is Striving To Teach The People Of Gurugram The Value Of Their Heritage
In January 2018, the 114-year-old Badshahpur Baolia in Gurugram was on the brink of perishing as it was
going to be filled up with sand before the construction of a road nearby. In order to preserve it, Parul Munjal, an academician, along with others, mobilized a group of students and teachers to save the baoli, making sure that the filling up the baoli was canceled.
“When I reached the site with my students, we saw the baoli was being filled up with sand. A well at the site had been completely covered. We feared that the baoli would perish, and decided to raise an alarm. We informed heritage bodies and concerned citizens, and finally left the place after being assured that the baoli wouldn’t be covered up,” said Munjal.
In the last one year, Munjal has not only sensitized citizens about preserving heritage but also visited many government offices in attempts to give the baoli a new life and also applied for funding from the World Monuments Fund for its conservation.
But the baoli isn’t the only structure that she is striving to protect. She leads awareness campaigns around heritage structures in the city, motivating her students to explore the heritage in Gurugram.
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“The idea was to work with heritage in the city and move beyond the heritage in Delhi. Delhi is something that everyone has been working on. It has been studied in length and the heritage has been mapped. Heritage in Gurugram is neither mapped nor is there any awareness about it. In order to change that, I started encouraging my students to look at heritage within the city, and got a student to look at the
Badshahpur baoli project in 2012,” she explained.
“Parul is a human dynamo capable of doing multiple tasks simultaneously – and all of them are done well. Her knowledge of the heritage of Gurugram, a city she has adopted, is enviable. She is ever willing to take on responsibility and contribute towards heritage conservation, both in terms of time and quality. She is among the most sought after personality in the field of heritage conservation in the city,” said Atul Dev, convener of the Gurugram chapter of INTACH.
“People in the city have started looking at heritage structures as mere property or land banks. This necessitates that a value for heritage in the city is generated,” said
Munjal.
Source - IndiaWomenBlog