It is indeed ironic that Tamil Nadu, one of the oldest, largest and more economically and educationally advanced states in the country has no fixed work-place for its political and civil leadership. This is evident from the present imbroglio surrounding the new secretariat building at Omandurar Government Estate and the old one at Fort St George.
Shifting the secretariat has been on the cards for several years commencing from late M G Ramachandran’s move to shift the capital to Tiruchy. This was followed with ideas of ‘Mamallapuram Administrative City’ and a ‘secretariat complex’ at Sholinganallur.
In 2003, the then government headed by J Jayalalithaa successively selected two sites for the construction of secretariat. First one was on Marina Boulevard by demolishing the historic Queen Mary’s College and the second was in the Anna University campus at the 43-acre site originally earmarked for the National Institute of Science. Due to stiff resistance from students, faculty, civil society activists and intervention by the high court both ventures were abandoned.
In 2007, M Karunanidhi quietly went about constructing the assembly-secretariat building in the Omandurar Government Estate. There was hardly any public consultation.
The new secretariat building has several plus points. The concept of four circular buildings — Public Plaza, with an open-air museum, Assembly Hall for legislative business, Law Department in the library representing the judiciary and finally the chief minister’s office. The complex has adopted ‘green-building’ features but this was overshadowed by the felling of several trees making the site look virtually barren.
The ambience of the building, its openness with lots of sun and fresh air is vastly different from the congested, dark and cloistered corridors of Fort St George.
This yet-to-be-completed structure was declared open on March 13, 2010 by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The Assembly commenced business first from these portals and soon thereafter departments under the chief minister and deputy chief minister were shifted there. The main office building is still under construction.
Now the whole office is being shifted back lock-stock-and-barrel to the good old fort without concern for the huge expenditure, about `1,100 crore, incurred in building the new structure and the money needed for this rollback. All these raise certain critical administrative, financial and governance issues that need to be addressed.
Administratively, the civil secretariat cannot continue within a military establishment having severe restrictions on the movement of people. Financially, the massive expenses incurred should be accounted for. Besides, the secretariat should be viewed not as just another building, but as a complex and nucleus for creating and sustaining a mini-township. This will entail shifting it out of the city to one of the corridors with state-of-the-art transportation facilities. This would considerably de-congest Chennai’s Central Business District, which is now choking.
If the mini-township is properly conceived and packaged applying ‘land-as-resource’ principle, the secretariat structure can pay for itself. Evolving such an alternative would require participatory and consultative process which hopefully the present government would undertake.