New assembly bld: A dream

SHILLONG, JAN 9: The old Meghalaya assembly building which was gutted thirteen years ago still does not have a permanent replacement as the assembly session is being held in a temporary location in the auditorium of the Meghalaya arts & culture building located at Rilbong.

The old assembly building, which was built during the British era and therefore was a heritage building, was gutted in an inferno on January 9, 2001. Thirteen years down the line, Meghalaya still does not have a permanent assembly building evoking surprise and disbelief.

Not that there was no effort to find a site for construction of the new assembly building but because of the disparate and often lack of focus on getting a site to build a permanent assembly among the legislators and sometimes the ngos the construction of the new assembly building looks like a distant dreams.

The Meghalaya assembly had even formed the High Powered Committee (HPC) consisting of the legislators with the Meghalaya assembly speaker as its chairman so that the task of finding a new assembly site is speeded up, but unfortunately the HPC members could not fulfill the task given to them even after thirteen years.

During the initial period of looking for the new assembly site,  some had favoured constructing the new assembly in the old site at Khyndai Lad but others differed saying that the new assembly must be build in a new site.

The current HPC chairman speaker AT Mondal now has to do what his predecessors failed in the last thirteen years. He has to find a suitable site that is agreeable to all the HPC members and a site that does nr rankle even the ngos as the latter had opposed to the idea of the former assembly speaker Charles Pyngrope to build the new assembly in the Tara Ghar.

Mondal told reporters on Thursday, “We have not been able to identity a suitable location and the HPC is trying to identify the site even today.”  He hoped that the HPC would be able to find a new site and start the construction of the new assembly this year.

In the past thirteen years the HPC had identify and various sites like Mawdiangdiang, Upper Shillong, Tara Ghar besides the old site at Khyndai Lad but faced opposition from one quarter of the other.

Because of such oppositions from within the legislators or the ngos, the legislators of the present ninth Meghalaya assembly adopted a resolution on April 10, 2013 entrusting the task of finding and constructing the new assembly building to the  HPC.- By Our Reporter