‘Central Vista Project Wasteful, Unnecessary’

Several former civil servants have written an open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressing their disappointment over the centre's ambitious central vista redevelopment project, which, they have said is "wasteful and unnecessary".

The 69 signatories including former IAS officers Jawhar Sircar, Jawed Usmani, Harsh Mander and former IPS officers AS Dulat, Amitabh Mathur claimed that the country’s public health infrastructure was crying out for investment and asked why this “wasteful and unnecessary project must take precedence over social priorities like health and education”.

"Notwithstanding the specious reasoning as to why a new Parliament building is at all necessary, it is a matter of great dismay that at a time when we are faced with an economy in perilous decline and a pandemic which has brought untold misery to millions, the government has chosen to invest vast sums on a project which represents nothing but the pursuit of pomp and grandeur," they said.

The centre is planning to rebuild the parliament building as part of the ambitious Central Vista project, that aims to renovate the government buildings on part of the 3 km Rajpath that stretches from the Rashtrapati Bhavan to the iconic war memorial India Gate.

The Central Public Works Department (CPWD), which is executing the project has revised its estimated cost from ₹ 11,794 crores to ₹ 13,450 crore.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had laid the foundation stone for the project on December 10. The retired bureaucrats, however, questioned the Prime Minister’s locus standi to perform the ceremony as the head of the executive and not the President.

“For a building that will accommodate the two Houses of Parliament, the appropriate protocol would have been for the President of India to lay the foundation stone. This was a clear instance of breach of constitutional propriety,” they said.

The retired bureaucrats, under the banner of the Constitutional Conduct Group, have urged the government to review the project, saying that they believed it should not be implemented, especially right now when the country’s economy is in decline and the COVID-19 pandemic has affected millions.