SHILLONG, Jan 7: The permanent Assembly building continues to elude the people of Meghalaya.
It was on January 9, 2001 when the iconic 125-year-old Assembly building at Khyndai Lad was destroyed in a devastating fire.
Ever since then, the dream of the people to have a new Assembly building has remained unfulfilled.
After years of a search and the relocation of the Assembly building, the state government finally zeroed in on a spacious location of 80 acres in the New Shillong Township for the envisaged new Assembly building.
The construction started in 2019-20 after the high-powered committee had allotted the work to Uttar Pradesh Rajkiya Nirman Nigam Ltd, a PSU of the Uttar Pradesh government.
Everything was going well but in May last year, the under-construction Assembly building dome collapsed one night all of a sudden.
The state government came under heavy criticism for the alleged shoddy construction.
The incident led to further delay of the project and now, it is not known when it will be complete.
An official of the PWD told The Shillong Times that the construction work will resume only after the new design of the dome is approved. Seven months have elapsed since the dome collapsed but the work for clearing the debris is still on.
It was decided that light materials will now be used for the dome in keeping with the suggestion of a team of the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati which conducted a study of the Assembly structure after the incident.
The IIT, Guwahati team had said the dome collapsed due to the lack of coordination among the designer, the contractor and the PMC.
