Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret furniture has moved from government storerooms and scrap yards to international auction rooms, revealing a governance failure that is larger than the loss of individual chairs or tables. The city’s design heritage was created as part of the Capital Project and crafted by Indian artisans, but for decades many of its objects were treated as surplus office furniture rather than as a distributed public collection requiring continuous protection.
The change in value has been dramatic. Furniture once considered old, damaged or unnecessary is now sought by overseas collectors and galleries. A 2016 set of invoices examined during a Directorate of Revenue Intelligence investigation recorded the sale of 19 Chandigarh and Punjab heritage pieces to a Seoul gallery for Rs 12.62 crore. Records also included a 2015 email seeking specific objects, including a rosewood table and V, X and Z chairs, for overseas sales. These details point to a market that was no longer dealing merely in unidentified discarded furniture. Chandigarh’s institutional markings, designs and provenance had themselves become valuable.
That transformation exposed the weakness of the system that held the objects. The furniture was dispersed across government departments, educational institutions, hospitals and other public bodies. It included chairs, tables, desks, stools, beds, screens, benches and other objects designed during the construction of Chandigarh. The objects did not exist in a single museum or archive. They remained embedded in everyday institutional spaces, which made responsibility for their identification, maintenance, movement and security more difficult to enforce.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, some pieces were shifted to storerooms and yards, while others were disposed of as scrap. Government institutions also sold hundreds of unused or damaged pieces, including to foreign nationals. At that time, the international market had not fully recognised their design significance. The eventual rise of global interest in mid-century modernism changed the financial incentives around them, but the administrative systems governing their custody did not appear to change at the same speed.
The first major institutional response came after the issue reached the Punjab and Haryana High Court around 2010-11. Heritage activist and advocate Ajay Jagga sought directions to prevent Chandigarh’s heritage objects from being auctioned abroad. On February 22, 2011, the Ministry of Home Affairs issued an order prohibiting further disposal of Le Corbusier-Jeanneret furniture. The order described the objects as valuable heritage items that had to be treated with care, and directed that wear and tear should be addressed through conservation and repair rather than sale.
The order was an important shift in classification. It formally moved the furniture away from the category of disposable government property and towards protected heritage. But classification alone could not resolve the practical problem of locating and tracking thousands of objects held by different custodians. A 2012 inventory identified 12,793 heritage items across 131 categories. Maintaining a complete and continuously updated inventory across the institutions and governments holding these objects remained a challenge.
That challenge is central to understanding how the losses occurred. A heritage inventory is not simply a historical list. It is also a control system. It must identify each object, record its location and custodian, document its condition, track any authorised movement and establish what happens when an institution no longer needs it. If an object is written off without its heritage identity being recognised, it can enter ordinary disposal channels. If it is moved without a reliable record, ownership and accountability become difficult to establish later.
Several incidents described in the report show how this vulnerability worked in practice. In June 2018, Customs officials at Delhi’s Inland Container Depot in Tughlaqabad intercepted 14 heritage chairs being sent to Belgium. One chair carried the marking “PUL-116”, while others had similar Panjab University markings. The university was asked to verify the pieces, later lodged a police complaint, and Chandigarh Police registered a theft case. The available record did not establish when or how the chairs had left the institution or the ownership of every chair. Even so, the interception demonstrated that Chandigarh-linked heritage furniture was moving through international cargo channels.
Another case emerged after a PGI employee saw government-stamped furniture offered for sale on a website. A subsequent check at Vitte-Yojna Bhawan in Sector 33 found 30 heritage furniture items missing, including 10 tables, 13 chairs, four wooden room partitions and three campers. A police case followed. The episode showed that the problem was not confined to old disposal decisions. It also involved the continuing difficulty of reconciling what institutions physically held with what their records said they held.
The latest intervention involved two chairs carrying institutional markings linked to Panjab University and PGIMER that appeared in a Paris auction. After Jagga approached the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of External Affairs and the Chandigarh administration, the Ministry of Culture asked the UT administration to coordinate with the MEA and the embassy to stop the auction and secure the pieces. Chandigarh Police registered two FIRs on June 23, and the pieces were withdrawn from the auction scheduled for June 25.
This outcome shows the value of coordinated intervention, but it also underlines how late in the chain protection often begins. By the time a marked object appears in an overseas auction, its movement has already passed through institutional custody, transport and international commercial channels. Recovery then depends on recognising the object, establishing its institutional connection and persuading or requiring authorities and auction houses to act. Prevention would require those controls to operate before the object leaves its authorised location.
The problem also extends beyond furniture. Chandigarh’s cast-iron manhole covers, designed by Le Corbusier in 1951, were for decades treated as ordinary civic infrastructure. They have since appeared as sought-after design collectibles at international auctions. Their story is a reminder that heritage can be embedded in the city’s functioning systems, not just displayed inside museums. A manhole cover may remain part of a road until it is removed, replaced or noticed by a collector. Its heritage value can therefore be lost through routine maintenance and procurement decisions unless civic agencies recognise it in advance.
This creates an administrative tension between use, conservation and ownership. Public institutions need furniture and infrastructure to function, repair and replace. Heritage protection, however, requires that replacement or disposal decisions account for historical and design value. The Ministry of Home Affairs order established that repair should take precedence over sale for protected furniture, but the incidents in the report suggest that the effectiveness of such directions depends on implementation across many separate institutions.
The market has made that implementation more difficult. According to Jagga, the rising value has produced an organised commercial market involving carpenters from Saharanpur, local scrap dealers and overseas antique dealers. The DRI records cited in the report suggest that specific pieces were being sourced for particular buyers. Investigations also raised questions over the use of false or misleading documentation to facilitate the movement of artefacts. These allegations concern the route by which objects may have left Chandigarh, but the documented institutional gaps are a separate and visible problem: incomplete inventories, weak tracking of written-off furniture and dispersed custodianship.
The numbers indicate the scale of the management task. The 2012 inventory covered 12,793 items across 131 categories, while the 2018 check at one location found 30 items missing. The intercepted Belgium consignment contained 14 chairs, and the Seoul gallery invoices covered 19 pieces valued at Rs 12.62 crore. These figures do not establish the total number or value of objects lost from Chandigarh. They do show the range of the issue, from individual institutional losses to international transactions involving dozens of objects.
The broader urban question is whether Chandigarh’s heritage is being managed as a living public system or only as a collection of exceptional objects. The city’s design legacy is present in furniture, civic elements, public buildings and everyday infrastructure. Protecting it therefore requires more than occasional auction interventions or a one-time inventory. It requires clear custodial responsibility, updated records and a consistent process for conservation, repair, movement and disposal across all institutions that possess these objects.
The supplied record confirms that government orders, inventories, police cases, customs action and diplomatic coordination have all been used to protect Chandigarh’s heritage. It also confirms that these measures have not eliminated the risks created by dispersed ownership and changing market value. The next test is whether protection becomes a continuous administrative function rather than a response triggered only when a marked chair, table or civic object appears for sale abroad.
