National_Mission_on_Monuments_and_Antiquities
National Mission on Monuments and Antiquities
Indian agency responsible for archaeological publication and preservation
The National Mission on Monuments and Antiquities (NMMA) is an Indian government agency responsible for maintaining the cultural heritage database under the Ministry of Culture of the Government of India. It was launched in 2007 aimed at studying, researching and preserving the cultural heritage of India. The main goal of the agency is to make information available online to the general public, explicitly for scholars and students interested or associated with the subject. Till 2016, it documented 3.15 lakhs of built heritage and sites and 1,400,740 antiquities collected from different published and unpublished secondary sources, originally investigated or studied by the researchers, educators, scholars and archaeologists.[3]
Responsible to maintain two national registers such as national registers on antiquities and national register on Built Heritage & Sites (BH&S),[1] it is referred to one of the important databases of the country in architectural and historical perspectives alongside the Archaeological Survey of India, a nodal agency of the NMMA.[4] It collaborates contractually with the state governments to collect reference works for managing its database more efficiently as amended by the union government.