Exactly when the statue of Brigadier General John Nicholson disappeared from outside Delhi's Kashmiri gate, and who took it, is unclear. The same goes for a rock carving in Jammu and Kashmir of the Hindu deity Devi riding a lion; and for the ruins of a copper temple in Arunachal Pradesh on the border with China.

The Indian government has taken steps to catalogue some of the country's missing monuments and archaeological treasures but activists insist much more needs to be done to prevent hundreds more monuments from going missing as India's cities swell with new residents.

The Rajya Sabha, or upper parliamentary house, recently heard that 35 of the country's centrally protected monuments had disappeared. The list stretches from Assam in the north east, where the guns of Emperor Sher Shah have vanished, to Karnataka in the south, where a prehistoric site near Mysore has been swallowed up.