False ceiling caves in at state Assembly building, none hurt
A portion of false ceiling on first floor of newly constructed Jharkhand assembly building collapsed on Friday evening reportedly due to leakage in the roof, raising questions over quality of construction of the building. No one was hurt in the incident, officials said.
Speaker Mahendra Prasad said he has written to the building construction department in this regard. “The issue of quality of construction is for the concerned construction agencies of the state government to look into. I have brought the recent incident into their notice. They need to look into the causes and do repair work. I have also asked them to look into other possibly damaged locations and fix them,” said Prasad.
The capital city received record rainfall due to the recently passed cyclone Yaas, and the false ceiling at the assembly building collapsed on Friday.
The incident has once again brought the issue of construction quality of the iconic building, with the latest incident being a second such event within a year. In August last year, false ceiling collapsed in the library of the Assembly building.
Standing on 39 acres in HEC area, the new Assembly building inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the run up to the 2019 Jharkhand assembly elections was constructed at a cost of ₹465 crore. It was constructed over a span of four
years.
The building has been courting controversy from the beginning, as the JMM, the opposition party at the time, boycotted the inauguration ceremony and oneday special session called in 2019 by the then Raghubar Das government, alleging that it was getting an incomplete building inaugurated in haste.
At the time of inauguration, only the central hall of the Assembly was ready, while the west and east wings of the threestorey building were completed later.