Sirpur's Brick Temples, the Baratang Mud Volcanoes and the Barren Island and Narcondam Volcanoes Joined India's UNESCO Tentative List, Which Now Shows 81 Entries

India’s page on UNESCO’s Tentative List now shows 81 entries, and three of them are new: the Sirpur Cultural and Archaeological Landscape in Chhattisgarh, the Karst-mud-volcano Complex of Baratang and the Andaman Subduction Volcanoes, which cover Barren Island and Narcondam. All three carry a submission date of 28 September 2026 on UNESCO’s site, and Indian news agencies reported them on 21 October. India’s Permanent Delegation to UNESCO thanked the Archaeological Survey of India for the documentation, according to the Open Magazine and ANI reports.

The Tentative List is a country’s own inventory of places it may later nominate for the World Heritage List. In its press release, as ANI reported it, the Delegation called an addition to the list a prerequisite before any property can be nominated. None of the three sites is a World Heritage Site, and this article uses “as of 29 October 2026” for everything that can still change.

What UNESCO’s page says, and the count

For each entry, UNESCO’s page carries a disclaimer: the content of a Tentative List is the sole responsibility of the State Party concerned. That makes the nomination texts below India’s own case for its sites, published by UNESCO, and every claim from them is attributed to the nomination here.

The total needs a caution. UNESCO’s India page, read on 29 October 2026, lists 81 entries; 12 of them carry a 2026 submission date and 15 carry 2025. The Press Information Bureau’s backgrounder on Sarnath, dated 26 August 2026, put India’s Tentative List at 69 properties. The pages I could open do not say when each entry was published, so the gap between 69 and a count of 78 before these three is not something I can explain. The Indian reports of 21 October give 81 after the additions, which matches UNESCO’s page.

The path from list to inscription can take decades. India’s 45th World Heritage Site, Sarnath, is the recent example: the PIB backgrounder says Sarnath entered the Tentative List in 1998, had its nomination submitted in January 2025 and was inscribed on 25 July 2026.

Sirpur, a capital on the Mahanadi

Sirpur sits on the eastern bank of the Mahanadi in Mahasamund district, Chhattisgarh. The nomination puts it 78 kilometres from the state capital, Raipur, and the PTI report says about 75. UNESCO files it as a cultural property under criteria (ii), for the exchange of architectural and artistic ideas, and (iv), for an ensemble that shows a stage in history.

The nomination describes Sirpur (historically Shripur or Sripura) as the capital of Dakshina Kosala under the Sharabhapuriya, Panduvamshi and Somavamshi rulers, with structures dating from the 5th to the 12th century CE. Hindu temples to Shiva and Vishnu stand with Buddhist monasteries and Jain structures in one settlement. The text also records a market complex, a royal complex, ghats on the river and a public bath for Ayurvedic treatment. It mentions the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who visited in the 7th century CE (the three Chinese pilgrims are covered separately).

The proposed core area has nine named components: the Lakshmana Temple, the Rama Temple, the Gandheshwar Temple, the Anandprabhu Kuti Vihara, the Swastik Vihara, the market complex, the Rajmahal, the Harshagupta and Teevardeo Buddha Vihara, and the Baleshwar group of monuments. PTI describes the Lakshmana Temple as built entirely of brick, from around the 7th century, and among the earliest and best-preserved brick temples in India. The nomination goes further and says its fully staggered square plan is the earliest known in India; that is the nomination’s claim.

The landscape lies in the Proterozoic Chhattisgarh Basin, and the nomination says the local stromatolites, layered structures built by cyanobacteria over more than a billion years, were used as building material.

Excavation history, as the nomination gives it: early documentation in the 19th century by Cunningham and others, digging in 1953 to 1956 under M. G. Dixit, and two larger campaigns from 1999 to 2003 and 2004 to 2012. The nomination also says that the visible area is a small share of the ancient town. About 300 houses and roughly 1,500 people live within the site today, and Gond and Baiga communities live in the buffer area, which also holds the Barnawapara Wildlife Sanctuary.

The ASI’s list of centrally protected monuments for its Raipur Circle includes entries at Sirpur in Mahasamund district. Dhammshil Ganvir, chief executive of the Sirpur Special Area Development Authority, said in the PTI report that a full nomination dossier must still be prepared with the ASI and the authority.

Baratang, where the mud is cool

Baratang Island lies between South Andaman and Middle Andaman, about 100 kilometres north of Sri Vijaya Puram (Port Blair), according to the nomination. The proposal covers two small pieces of it: about one square kilometre of limestone caves and 1.23 hectares of mud volcanoes in the Reserve Forest near Jarawa Creek. It files them as a natural property under criteria (viii), (ix) and (x).

The local name for the mud volcanoes is Jalki. They push out cool mud, water and gas, mainly methane and hydrogen sulphide, driven by pressured shale layers and not by magma. The nomination counts four clusters of small vents, each mound about two metres high at the centre, and says they erupted again in 2025 after 20 years of dormancy. A speleothem (a cave mineral deposit) from the Baratang Mahadev Gupha cave has been used to reconstruct the Indian summer monsoon from the 10th to the 19th century, the nomination says, citing a 2020 study by Jaglan and others.

The Geological Survey of India studied the 2025 activity. PTI reported on 19 October 2025 that an eruption was reported on 2 October, that the survey’s team visited on 8 and 9 October, and that ejected samples belong to the Oligocene epoch, about 23 million years ago. The vent clusters had grown to about 500 square metres, from an earlier recorded 100. The survey’s Deputy Director General, Santanu Bhattacharjee, recommended that the Andaman and Nicobar administration restrict public access, build a viewpoint at a safe distance and strengthen fencing and signs, because eruptions can be violent and unpredictable. I could not find a page that says what the administration did next, so check the current position before planning a visit.

The nomination says most of the limestone caves are largely inaccessible because of the terrain. Open Magazine and ANI both place the site within the Baratang Reserve Forest and the Jarawa Tribal Reserve. Our Andaman and Nicobar profile explains who may enter the tribal reserves.

Barren Island and Narcondam

The Andaman Subduction Volcanoes entry covers two islands. Barren Island is about 138 kilometres north-east of Sri Vijayapuram, covers about 8.34 square kilometres and rises 354 metres; the nomination calls it South Asia’s only active volcano. Narcondam, about 240 kilometres north-east, covers 6.8 square kilometres and rises 710 metres. The nomination says they are the only Quaternary subduction volcanoes in the inner volcanic arc of the Burma-Andaman-Java chain, and that they differ: Barren Island’s lavas are mainly basalt, while Narcondam’s range from dacite to rhyolite.

Barren Island’s first recorded eruption was in 1787. The nomination lists major eruptions in 1991, 1994 to 1995 and 2005 to 2007, mild eruptions in September 2025, and an ash plume to 1.2 kilometres on 10 January 2026, citing the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program. It sits inside the Barren Island Wildlife Sanctuary.

Narcondam was uninhabited until a police check post of about 20 personnel was set up in 1968. The nomination says tourism is not allowed on the island. It is the only home of the Narcondam hornbill, which the IUCN lists as Vulnerable and which the nomination, citing a 2024 study by Naniwadekar and others, puts at around 1,000 birds. The Narcondam shrew was discovered in 2021, the nomination says. ANI adds that the island is an Important Bird Area and a Key Biodiversity Area, and that only the land of the two islands is proposed.

The listing follows a 2025 push. On 29 July 2025 the Andaman and Nicobar Chief Secretary, Chandra Bhushan Kumar, told PTI that the administration was proposing four natural landmarks, among them Barren Island, Narcondam and the Baratang mud volcanoes, and working with the Geological Survey of India to develop them as geo-heritage destinations. The survey identified the same four places as geoheritage sites, according to a local report of 2 August 2025. The fourth, the natural coral bridge at Shaheed Dweep, is not among the three entries reported in October 2026.

Reaching them and what is not covered here

Sirpur lies in Mahasamund district. Chhattisgarh Tourism places the district headquarters, Mahasamund, 56 kilometres south-east of Raipur, on the Mumbai to Kolkata and Raipur to Visakhapatnam national highways and on the Raipur to Visakhapatnam rail route. The road distance from Raipur to Sirpur itself is the 78 kilometres in the nomination or the 75 kilometres in the PTI report. This article gives no opening hours or ticket rates for Sirpur because the official pages that carry them could not be read when it was written; the ASI’s Raipur Circle, which looks after Sirpur’s protected monuments, is the office to ask.

For the Andaman sites, the only entry rule an official document gives is the nomination’s statement that tourism is not allowed on Narcondam. Barren Island is a wildlife sanctuary, and the rules for boats and landings come from the Andaman and Nicobar administration and its forest department, whose pages could not be opened for this article.