India Adds Three Sites Including Baratang and Sirpur to UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List

Key facts

• Three new sites — the Karst-mud-volcano Complex of Baratang, the Andaman Subduction Volcanoes (Narcondam and Barren Islands), and the Sirpur Cultural and Archaeological Landscape in Chhattisgarh — were added to India's Tentative List of UNESCO's World Heritage Convention, as announced by the Permanent Delegation of India to UNESCO in October 2026.
• Addition to the Tentative List is a prerequisite before any property can be nominated for inscription on the World Heritage List, and the Archaeological Survey of India was credited for preparing the documentation and heritage research.
• Baratang Island in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands features limestone caves, mud volcanoes locally called 'Jalki', and the largest underground cave complex in the region within about one square kilometre; it is protected under the Baratang Reserve Forest/Jarawa Tribal Reserve.
• Baratang's mud volcanoes emit cool slurries of mud, water, methane and hydrogen sulphide driven by overpressured shale layers rather than magma, and after 20 years of dormancy they erupted again in 2025.
• Narcondam and Barren Islands are the only Quaternary-period (last ~2.6 million years) subduction volcanoes in the inner volcanic arc of the Burma-Andaman-Java complex; Barren Island has a 2-kilometre-wide caldera formed during the Pleistocene and was declared a Geoheritage site by the Geological Survey of India in 2025.
• Narcondam Island is identified as an Important Bird Area by BirdLife International and the Bombay Natural History Society and as a Key Biodiversity Area.
• Sirpur Village in Mahasamund district, Chhattisgarh, lies on the eastern banks of the Mahanadi River about 78 kilometres from Raipur, is a nationally protected monument, and sits within the Proterozoic Chhattisgarh Basin with landscapes built by stromatolites formed over a billion years by cyanobacteria.
• Sirpur's buffer area includes Gond and Baiga tribes, around 300 houses with nearly 1500 residents, and the Barnawapara Wildlife Sanctuary.