New Building of Punjab Assembly Goes Heavy on Exchequer

The estimated project cost of the new building of Punjab Assembly has swelled to more than 3% as it remained standstill for over a decade and half.

The documents available with News360 show that the first estimated cost of the project in 2005 was just Rs 800 million.

Owing to delay in completion despite that it was supposed to be finished in a year and half, the estimated cost of the new building of Punjab Assembly has jacked up to over Rs 2.5 billion now.

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The documents read that the deadline for the completion of the new structure of the legislative assembly was 18 months when its foundation was laid in 2005.

As the development work faced impediments because of political and financial reasons, the estimated expenditure on the new structure kept balloning.

Now, it has been around 300 weeks since inception and the cost has jumped from Rs 800 million to whopping Rs 2.57 billion until third revision.

The year 2005 wasn’t the first time that the expansion of the Punjab Assembly was sought.

Back in 1934, the government of British India had decided to construct a new building of then-Punjab assembly for 150 lawmakers owing to space constraints.

According to latest details, Punjab Planning and Development Board (P&D) has set a deadline of December 31 for finishing the long-lingered project.

For this purpose, the Punjab finance department has already sent a summary for earmarking more than Rs 20 million for the new structure of the Punjab Assembly in the next fiscal budget.