Former Nongkrem MLA Ardent M Basaiawmoit today said that an independent inquiry should be constituted into the collapse of the portion of the new Meghalaya Legislative Assembly building.
Basaiawmoit said that an independent inquiry free from any government interference should look into the incident.
“Even a newly constructed chicken coop is built properly so for such a huge construction it doesn’t feel right that such an erroneous blunder could have occurred if it is not for some other reason,” he told Highland Post.
Stating that he believed that those who qualified for the tender and those that supervise the construction know the nature of work very well, including the plan and estimates, he said that blaming design faults or the weight of the dome is a poor excuse.
Basaiawmoit added that this is just one of a string of recent examples of what appears to a layman as bad construction – the others being the Dwar Ksuid bridge in Ri-Bhoi, the Inter State Bus Terminus and Mawlai Bypass – and it suggests that rampant corruption should really be blamed.
“Corruption always results in poor quality of work. And there will never be quality work when there is high corruption right from the top to the lowest level,” he said, adding that if the people in authority keep blaming something else then it only shows that they are not fit to lead the state. “It is obvious that corruption is the root of all these happenings but to find out from where all this corruption is rooted there has to be an inquiry.”
He further stated that it is high time that people understand these revelations and choose their leaders wisely.