Conservation is an attempt to preserve, conserve and protect heritages that have universal outstanding value and historical significance. The sense of conservation of heritages dates back to 17th and 18th centuries; preceding the time number of agencies like UNESCO intervened in conservation strategies through conventions. The glimpse of these attempts was seen in Nepal when the first Monument Preservation Act,1956 was adopted as a conservation policy and UNESCO listed number of historic buildings and area as World Heritage like Hanumandhoka Durbar Square, Changunarayan, Pashupatinath, Swayambhu and others. These are the reminiscent of the past and are prone to disaster. In 2015, these heritages area were affected by the Gorkha Earthquake. As a part of post disaster recovery, the affected monuments underwent restoration or rehabilitation. The study took the opportunity to assess the status and challenges associated with the conservation of monuments in the Hanumandhoka Durbar Square where the various initiatives and contracts issued for rehabilitation, or the conservation efforts have been delayed. The study also tried to investigate the possible mitigation measures for challenges associated with the conservation of monument buildings. The study employed the qualitative approaches to identify current status of conservation of monuments using the Likert’s scale, Bloom Cutoff and secondary data collection; studied the challenges associated with conservation of monuments in Hanumandhoka Durbar Square using the Principal Component Analysis and categorized the possible challenges based on the variance and correlation of item in each category. The study tried to identify possible mitigation measures to address challenges in conservation of monument buildings through Key Informant Interview (KII) with the stakeholders, engineers, archaeologist and conservation practitioners. The results indicate that most of the structures under conservation contracts were completed on time though a few of them have not started yet. 83% of the conservation contracts were found to be completed. The study identified six major categories of challenges viz. resource challenges, time and cost related challenges, quality related challenges, safety related challenges, procurement related challenges and challenges related with guidelines, norms and policy in the conservation of monuments. The major insights for remedies were related with capacity development of ii stakeholders and manpower, motivate inheritance of workmanship from generation to generation, fair and realistic payment to the worker, private sector engagement in supply chain of materials, forecasting appropriate time and cost schedule for heritage conservation work, material analysis and devising proper specification for the work, cost for quality audit and in-situ lab, occupational safety and health implementation and training to workers as well as stakeholder, proper bidding mechanism and elucidate documentation, robust government policies, norms and guidelines addressing current practices and conservation technology, roles and responsibilities of different administrative units. Hence, the effective way to mitigate the challenges occurring in the conservation projects are identifying them and managing the challenges to ensure successful completion of projects. The conservation projects are different from the ordinary construction projects so necessary capacity development, training, material analysis, and community engagement are necessary to hold the essence of conservation. For this the accounting agencies should plan for training and motivation costs. The identified challenges are the reflections from the stakeholder and conservationists, so the challenges inventoried can be used as a reference for better planning, implementation, resource allocation, standardization of policies, specification and other legal norms for minimizing the challenges associated with the conservation of monuments. The possible measures identified in this study are from the expert opinions and conservationist directly involved in the conservation of monuments, so the possible measures can be established as a road map to plan and prepare for similar conservation projects to minimize the identified challenges. The stringent policies, guidelines, norms and standards forms the regulatory framework to minimize the challenges associated with conservation of monumental projects and hence, government should prioritize in formation of such strategies to make the implementation of conservation project robust.

Keywords

Bloom Cutoff, Challenges, Conservation, Hanumandhoka Durbar Square Heritage, Likert’s Scale, Monuments, Principal Component Analysis

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