The new Meghalaya Assembly building should be made ready before the 2024 Lok Sabha election, state Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Ernest Mawrie said today.
Addressing a press conference here, Mawrie said that the new Parliament building was inaugurated last Sunday 28 months after construction began and without “untoward incident” or scams.
He contrasted this with the Meghalaya Assembly, whose original structure burnt down in 2001. Since then, even more than 20 years on, no new permanent replacement was found or constructed. A new structure is nearing completion in the New Shillong Township but that experienced a huge hiccup when the massive under-construction dome collapsed spectacularly last year.
Recently, Speaker Thomas A Sangma said that 80 per cent of work on the two wings of the building has been completed. The biggest challenge is to reconstruct the dome over the central part of the building he had said after inspecting the progress of the work.
Sangma said the new design of the dome will be vetted and approved by IIT Roorkee and IIT Guwahati. Necessary approval of the design from these two institutions is awaited, he added.
