I entirely agree with the following comments of Prof. DK Chakrabarti, whose contributions to Indian archaeology are exemplary. It is just shocking indeed to find Govt. of India receiving foreign funds to conduct archaeological studies. Hopefully, the decision should be reversed, in national interest, after due diligence review.
Kalyanaraman
"(Excavations at Rakhigarhi (2013 >) Vasant Shinde of the Deccan College, a long-time collaborator of Japanese and American archaeologists, has been granted permission by the Archaeological Survey of India under the Director Generalship of Gautam Sengupta to conduct excavations at Rakhigarhi in Haryana, which would be funded by the Global Heritage Fund.
It is worth putting on record that this is the first time that a foreign NGO has been allowed to bear the expenses of an excavation in India. It must be noted that there is no lack of funds for conducting excavations in India. I have repeatedly heard young friends in the Archaeological Survey of India and the universities proclaiming that money is not a problem to do fieldwork. So, the first question one has to ask is if the Deccan College which is funded 100% by the Maharashtra government sought funds from the government and/or University Grants Commission and other (cf. Indian Council of Historical Research) sources for its Rakhigarhi excavations. My assumption is that funds have been sought from a foreign NGO with some specific purpose in mind. As NGOs of this kind are not really charitable organizations and generally act as the front of a large number of people in the background, we can expect various kinds of foreign 'Indus experts' trying to take over the 'Indus' scene and lecturing us Indians how to do Indus archaeology. Secondly, this is the first time that such a large and important site in India has been handed over to foreign funding and thus foreign control. Thirdly, the way permission has been granted to re-excavate the site when the report on the first spell of work there is under preparation is ethically unacceptable.
Apparently, the powers behind the issue of this permission are not concerned with archaeological ethics or the national interest of the country in the domain of archaeology. I would like to emphasize that from these points of view, the Global Heritage Fund participation in the Rakhigarhi excavations under Vasant Shinde of the Deccan College marks a watershed in the history of Indian archaeology. From now on, there will be increasingly successful attempts to take over Indian archaeology from the Indians by miscellaneous groups of racially arrogant people masquerading as archaeologists under the umbrella of various foreign NGOs."