The Bengal Opposition has questioned Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s “Tughlaqan” plans to temporarily shift the State Secretariat from the colonial Writers’ Buildings to Howrah.
“When the Government is regularly complaining of huge debts, when it cannot pay its employees the salary arrears and dearness allowances, when they cannot provide the support price for rice forcing the farmers to commit suicide, this Government is spending hundreds of crores in less important ventures,” State Opposition leader and CPI(M) Politburo member Surya Kanto Mishra said on Thursday.
The Chief Minister has decided to shift the entire Secretariat along with its files and 7,000 staff to a multi-storey enclosure across the Hooghly River in Howrah by October 1 as she wants to refurbish the 300-year-old gothic structure which was once used by the British East India Company to house its garrison and then as a State office of clerks.
The Chief Minister wants to demolish all the pre-Independence additions to the massive Building and “restore it to its former glory.” She said, “The Writers’ Buildings has turned into a tinderbox with small wooden cubicles and faulty ancient electric lines. This centuries old building requires immediate repairs as safety of the thousands of employees working here is of primary concern for me.”
While the repairs could cost the Government a whopping Rs 250 crores, the shifting exercise of all the departments along with the files and other essential services including the telephone lines and cables would require Rs 50 crore in the lower side, PWD and other experts said. “Repairing and beautification is good but this massive expenditure in one go is mindless,” Mishra said, adding the Government could have done it in phases. “It would take thousands if lakhs of files to be shifted and stored in manner that they are not destroyed,” he said.
In the new HRBC building the Chief Minister’s office would be housed on the 12th and 13th floors overlooking the Hooghly River. “The Chief Minister may go for Ganga darshan alone but why she is taking this Tughlaqan exercise by taking all her staff and the entire system 5 km away for a work that could have been done in phases and for far less an amount,” the Marxist leader asked.