Shankargarh is a town and a nagar panchayat

Nagar Panchayat

A nagar palika or nagar panchayat is a form of an urban political unit in India comparable to a municipality.An urban centre with more than 30,000 and less than 100,000 inhabitants is classified as a nagar panchayat....

 in Allahabad district

Allahabad District

Allahabad district is one of the districts of Uttar Pradesh state of India, and Allahabad town is the district headquarters. Allahabad district is a part of Allahabad Division.As of 2011 it is the most populous district of Uttar Pradesh ....

 in the India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n state

States and territories of India

India is a federal union of states comprising twenty-eight states and seven union territories. The states and territories are further subdivided into districts and so on.-List of states and territories:...

 of Uttar Pradesh

Uttar Pradesh

Uttar Pradesh abbreviation U.P. , is a state located in the northern part of India. With a population of over 200 million people, it is India's most populous state, as well as the world's most populous sub-national entity...

.

Demographics

the India census

Census

A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. The term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common...

, Shankargarh had a population of 13,116. Males constitute 53% of the population and females 47%. Shankargarh has an average literacy rate of 61%, higher than the national average of 59.5%: male literacy is 70%, and female literacy is 52%. In Shankargarh, 17% of the population is under 6 years of age.

Silica Mines

The main occupation of local population is mining activity, stone quarrying as the land is not much fertile. The Raja of Shankargarh has mining rights over 46 villages (covering an area of 150 sq km) in perpetuity and gives the rights to contractors who in turn hire local labourers to extract minerals.

Caves

These caves were long known to the locals. They also knew about the prehistoric cave paintings but did not mention their age and value. But when labourers were pounding the rock face with hammers, hewing off chunks of stone to sell for silica, the locals were alarmed. They were sure it was wrong to destroy them and fetched the police superintendent from the neighbouring village. Superintendent Vijay Kumar recognized the possible value of the paintings, and exhorted the labourers to lay down their tools.

The red paintings show dancing people, men on horseback and a tribe hunting a bison with spears. First examination gives an age between 10,000 and 30,000 years, which is the Upper Palaeolithic era. They can not only be found at the cave entrance wall, but also inside the cave system. There are scenes from prehistoric life as well as detailed diagrams of the internal organs of animals. This resembles the drawings of Australian aboriginies. The cave also contains descarded tools of the painters.

This cave is not open to the public in the moment. There will probably be a certain time of scientific research and the cave will be closed some years. But the Uttar Pradesh State Tourism Department is already planning to build a road into the jungle to the cave.

External links

• Indian cave art saved from the wreckers from The Times online dated 2002-10-31