Decision 43 COM 7B.62

Mountain Railways of India (India) (C 944ter)

The World Heritage Committee,

1. Having examined Document WHC/19/43.COM/7B.Add,
2. Recalling Decisions CONF 209 VIII.C.1, 29 COM 8B.31 and 32 COM 8B.28, adopted at its 23rd (Marrakesh, 1999), 29th (Durban, 2005) and 32nd (Quebec City, 2008) sessions respectively,
3. Regrets that the State Party did not submit the information requested by the World Heritage Centre between 2017 and 2019 regarding the lack of monitoring and general maintenance, serious encroachment by illegal construction and waste dumping along the tracks of the property;
4. Takes note of the outcomes of the 2018 mission to the property of the UNESCO Office in New Delhi and expresses concern about the erosion of attributes bearing the Outstanding Universal Value (OUV), as a result of management issues faced by the property over the 20 years since its inscription, and failure to implement the recommendations formulated by ICOMOS at the time of inscription;
5. Welcomes the initiative of Indian Railways to set up a self-benefiting Funds-in-Trust project in order to help develop a Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP) for the property to address longstanding issues, and requests the State Party to:
   1. Implement this plan once it has been reviewed by the World Heritage Centre and the Advisory Bodies,
   2. Establish a conservation and management unit for the property;
6. Recommends that the State Party submit to the World Heritage Committee a proposal to clarify the property’s boundaries and define a buffer zone, along with details of proposed policy and legal instruments to improve the protection and management of the property;
7. Also requests the State Party to invite a joint World Heritage Centre/ICOMOS Reactive Monitoring mission to the property in order to assist the State Party in assessing the property’s state of conservation, to identify priorities for action and report on these, while also formulating a set of recommendations for the State Party aimed at preventing further erosion of the property’s OUV;
8. Further requests the State Party to submit to the World Heritage Centre, by 1 February 2020, a report on the state of conservation of the property and the implementation of the above, for examination by the World Heritage Committee at its 44th session in 2020.