Jhapa, December 28

Construction of the building of the proposed Girija Prasad Koirala memorial meeting hall in Jhapa district headquarters Chandragadi hasn’t been completed even four years after the work started.

The construction project that started in June 2015 was scheduled to be completed in two years. But the construction work is yet to be over due to the government’s apathy to allocate budget. Two years after the expiry of the contract, around 60 per cent of the building construction had been completed.

Lalitpur-based Prera-Shah Engineering JV had won the contract for the project through a tender process at estimated cost of 112.627 million rupees. Lately, not a single representative of the contractor is present at the site and construction work has been halted for the past one year.

Nepali Congress leader Krishna Prasad Sitaula blamed delay in construction of the building on the government.

“There has been no progress in the construction work ever since the communist government came to power,” said the NC leader.

“The project’s groundbreaking ceremony was carried out jointly by then prime minister Sushil Koirala, CPN-UML chairperson KP Oli and CPN-MC chairperson Pushpa Kamal Dahal and NC leader Bijaya Kumar Gachhadar, but it’s unfortunate that the project has been ignored,” said Sitaula, who called on the government to do the needful to complete the project at the earliest. The meeting hall building will have 27 commercial shutters on the ground floor, space for banks and financial institutions on the first floor, office on the third floor and the meeting hall accommodating over 1,000 persons on the fourth floor.