Kuno

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. Additional information may please be sent as messages to the Facebook community, Indpaedia.com. All information used will be gratefully acknowledged in your name.

History

Silver coins unearthed in 2022

P Naveen, Oct 21, 2022: The Times of India

BHOPAL: After cheetahs, Kuno is abuzz over buried treasure. Workers digging inside the national park in MP’s Sheopur district for construction of staff quarters have apparently unearthed a pot of die-struck copper and silver coins, more than two centuries old.

Unconfirmed reports say the treasure was buried a few feet under the earth close to Palpur fortress area — but some distance away from the enclosures where Namibian cheetahs were released. It's ours, hand it over to us, a descendant of the royal family told TOI.

While field director KNP Uttam Sharma said he had no news of this, DFO P K Verma said he was trying to verify the inputs and would take necessary action if found to be true.

Sources, however, told TOI that the pot was found on Wednesday and labourers distributed the coins among themselves. Many of them did not turn up for work on Thursday. Some of them took pictures and shared it on WhatsApp after which it spread like wildfire, triggering tremendous excitement in surrounding villages.

The Palpur royals, who had to vacate their fortress and 260-bigha land when Kuno was declared a sanctuary for shifting of Gir lions, were also informed by locals about the alleged discovery of the hidden treasure.

“We heard that they have found around four sacks full of coins,” R K Shreegopal Deo Singh Palpur, a descendent of the royal family, told TOI. “The forest department is secretly trying to dismantle our property (fort) for a long time so that we can be denied our claims to it,” he alleged.

“This is not the first time that they have found treasure but when you inspect the fort thoroughly, you can see many places have been dug up. Legally, the property is ours until there is a final settlement or our case in court reaches a final judgment,” he said, adding, “The forest department and archaeological department should not do anything on our property. Whatever they have found while digging belongs to the royal family of Palpur.”

He demanded that the valuables be handed over to the family. “They should stop all activities on our property or I will be forced to take legal action,” said Shreegopal Deo Singh, who is also fighting a battle in court against the state government to get their ancestral properties back.

The fortress is located in the core area of Kuno sanctuary, where cheetahs were released by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on September 17.

Located on the banks of Kuno river, the fort — Palpur Garhi, as it is locally known — had to be vacated by the Palpur royal family, along with people of 24 villages of their erstwhile ‘jagir’, after the area was notified as a wildlife sanctuary in 1981. When descendants of the Palpur family asked for compensation, the public works department (PWD) said in its survey report that the property was over 100 years old and had “zero value”. Based on this report, compensation was flatly denied.