Hyderabad: With Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao setting a deadline of 72 hours, the offices of Telangana state secretariat have started moving to other places to clear the way for the demolition of the old buildings.
The Roads and Buildings department was the first to move out its belongings, including furniture and files, from the Secretariat to makeshift office at Errum Manzil. Many other departments were shifting their offices to the nearby Burgula Ramakrishna building where necessary repair and renovation work was done. Offices of key departments including home, finance, general administration and Chief Secretary will be located in this building. However the Chief Minister’s secretariat was likely to be shifted to the Metro Rail Bhavan, headquarters of the Hyderabad Metro.
The shifting of all the offices from various blocks of the old secretariat was expected to take at least one month after which the buildings will be demolished and the construction work of a new complex will start.
Officials said that the chief minister set the deadline of 72 hours to start the shifting after he found the process too slow for his liking. “CM is unhappy that even after more than month of laying foundation stone for the new complex, nothing had happened on the ground”, a senior official said.
Officials were concerned that moving the offices will affect the functioning of the state administration as they will take time to settle down in their new makeshift offices. They were also worried that the offices which were located at one place so far will be scattered in many areas of Hyderabad till the new building was constructed.
KCR’s plans of constructing a new secretariat and the state assembly building at a cost of more than Rs5 billion has evoked a strong protest from the opposition parties who called it a waste of precious resources.
Meanwhile Telangana state High Court has reserved its judgement on the batch of petitions challenging the decision of the state government to demolish heritage building of Errum Manzil Palace to construct a new state Assembly building.
A division bench comprising of Chief Justice Raghavendra Singh Chauhan and Justice Shameem Akhtar after hearing the arguments of the counsels for petitioners as well as the state government reserved the judgement. The petitioners including the descendants of Nawab Viqar ul Umra, who built the palace 150 years ago challenged the demolition plan citing its status of “heritage structure”. The government on the other hand stressed that it had powers to take a policy decision to build a new Assembly building in place of the dilapidated old building.
