Kedah has no money to gazette all temple ruins, says Mukhriz

The Kedah government does not have enough allocation to gazette all the temple ruins in the state as there were “thousands” of them scattered around, said Menteri Besar Datuk Mukhriz Mahathir.

"There are thousands of temple ruins and if we want to gazette all of them, we need to pay the owner of the land.

"Thousands of ringgit will be needed to do this, and we don't have that kind of money," he told reporters at the Putra World Trade Centre where he is attending the Umno general assembly.

"Rome is also built on ruins as well," he added, referring to the capital of Italy.

As such, Mukhriz said, the state government proposed to only protect temple ruins which had historical value.

In debating the president’s speech yesterday, Kedah Umno representative Datuk Tajul Urus Mat Zain had said the state would lose a whole state assembly if all the ruins were to be gazetted as heritage sites.

The Tanjung Dawai assemblyman said there were too many of them and they were all over Kedah.

"There are too many temple ruins - by the river, under the house and such. We will lose the whole state assembly if all these were to be gazetted," he said.

Archeologists had told The Malaysian Insider that the temple ruins in Lembah Bujang which have not been gazetted were being destroyed beginning a few years ago.

The chairman of the NGO Bujang Valley Study Circle, Datuk V Nadarajan, said that the ruins in Lembah Bujang, which were built since the 10th century, were being destroyed without public knowledge.