Citing the scarcity of space in Haryana Vidhan Sabha, Speaker Gian Chand Gupta on Monday shot off a letter to the Union Home Ministry, State Government and Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla demanding a separate building for the State Assembly.
In his letter, Gupta demanded construction of a grand Vidhan Bhawan for Haryana on the lines of Parliament House and modern Legislative Buildings of newly formed states.
At present, the Vidhan Sabha building is common for both the Haryana and Punjab State Legislative Assemblies.
He said that the nature of legislative work is changing with the times. Not only enough space but infrastructure with modern technology is also the need of the hour for legislative work. The State Government should ask the Chandigarh Administration for a place for a new Vidhan Bhawan of Haryana, Gupta said. A copy of the letter has also been sent to the Leader of Opposition in the Legislative Assembly, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, to take the opposition along in the demand.
Raking up the old issue of Haryana not getting its full share as per the agreement reached at the time of partition with Punjab, the Speaker said that even after 55 years of the state's existence, Haryana Vidhan Sabha is facing the brunt of space shortage. Haryana has not been able to get its full share and due to having the same legislative building for both Punjab and Haryana, many problems are also being faced, he said. Further giving examples of other states of the country, Gupta said that all the states and even some union territories have independent legislative buildings. Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Telangana, Uttarakhand have their own buildings for Vidhan Sabha.
Apart from this, despite already having the building of the State Assembly, the new constructions were also done by the states according to the demand of the time. The newly constructed Vidhan Bhavan of Rajasthan Legislative Assembly in Jaipur, Gujarat Legislative Assembly in Gandhi Nagar, Vidhan Bhavan located in Dharamshala of Himachal Pradesh are the prime examples.
Not only this, a new Parliament building is also being built according to the requirements in the national capital, he mentioned in his letter.
The Assembly Speaker, while mentioning the proposed delimitation in the letter said that in the proposed delimitation in 2026, 14 seats of Lok Sabha and 126 seats of Vidhan Sabha are estimated in Haryana, but there is a seating arrangement of 90 MLAs in the House.
Only five years are left for 2026, so planning will have to be done in this direction from now on, he asserted.
Elaborating about the space crunch in the existing Assembly buildings, Gupta said that there is also not enough space for Ministers, committee chairpersons and MLAs to sit during the assembly sessions. On the other hand, almost all the ministers of the Punjab Legislative Assembly are provided with independent rooms for their office during the session, he said.
Not only this, there is not enough space for the seating arrangement of about 350 officers and employees serving in the Haryana Legislative Assembly Secretariat. For this reason, three to four branches have to be accommodated in a room. Parking issue is another major problem due to the common legislative building of two states and this problem gets worse during the session days, he added.
He also suggested construction of a high-tech media centre at the new Vidhan Sabha.
Notably, it is not the first time that the issue of space crunch at Vidhan Sabha has been raised by Haryana.
For years,Punjab and Haryana have been at loggerheads over space in the common Vidhan Sabha building. In the past, Gupta had also written to his Punjab counterpart Rana KP Singh seeking the state's full share in the State Assembly but the latter had claimed that “not an inch was due”.
After Haryana came into existence on November 1, 1966, both states have common buildings for the Secretariat, Vidhan Sabha and the Punjab and Haryana High Court.