For Santiniketan, Unesco World Heritage status has been a decade-long wait

The narrative tends to veer towards Tagore and intangible wealth, while the criteria focuses on tangible elements

The International Council on Monuments and Sites, a Unesco advisory body, has recommended that Santiniketan be included in the list of World Heritage Sites. It’s now for committee members of different countries to accept the recommendation at a meeting to be held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in September.

The idea of Santiniketan as a world heritage site has been in the making for more than a decade. The nomination dossier was first prepared in 2009 by conservation architects Abha Narain Lambah and Manish Chakraborty for the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). But for various reasons it did not move forward.