MADRAS, India -- Sadly, India continues to let its heritage and history decay. For example, recently when a scholar from the country's prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi asked India's National Archives, also in the same city, for a document, the request was not entertained. The scholar was told that the document was "too brittle."

More than a third of the Archives' treasures are in various stages of degeneration. It may not be long before invaluable records, some from the Mughal Period -- including those pertaining to the East India Co., which traded in and then ruled India before the British Crown took over in the mid-1800s -- are lost forever.

The more visible part of India's past is treated as shabbily and with as much contempt. Take, for example, the fascinating ruins of Hampi (in the modern southern Indian state of Karnataka), the capital city of the renowned Vijayanagar Empire in the 1400s and 1500s. Declared a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the ruins were misused by the local administration, which built two bridges across the historic area. UNESCO threatened to delist Hampi.