Editorial: The move out of Fort St George

The Tamil Nadu government is said to be reconsidering the location for its proposed new secretariat-cum-assembly complex. Its current choice, Pattinapakkam on the Chennai coastline, has run into opposition from residents, urban planners, environmentalists and political parties, including some government allies.

While discounting criticism from political opponents, some of whom toyed with similar projects when they were in power, other concerns, chiefly the loss of livelihood caused to displaced fishermen in 10 hamlets, deserve serious consideration by the three committees working on the project.

This is not the first time that the party ruling from Fort St. George has felt discomfited by space constraints within the complex. Additions and refurbishments took place throughout the two and a half centuries of British rule and then again since Independence, right down to the most recent modernisation 12 years ago. With the number of departments and staff growing over the last 40 years, conditions for employees and visiting citizens have grown cramped. But expansion is constrained by the need to accommodate the Defence Ministry structures within the complex and abide by the heritage priorities set by the Archaeological Survey of India.

This has been the experience of all governments that inherited seats of power from the British Raj or Princely India. When the transfer of power took place, the incoming governments moved into whatever buildings were available, which resulted in a scattering of departments around capital cities. This served two principles that were important then: economy and decentralisation. But latterly governments have developed a taste for working out of grand edifices that supposedly are functionally more efficient but in fact also address a need to showcase power.

The Union government’s Rs 20,000 crore Central Vista Project has set the tone for this by supplanting a perfectly working arrangement inherited from colonial times with a new citadel commissioned expressly to represent a new idea of nationalism. In 2023, the government of Telangana razed the Nizam-era Secretariat and built an entirely new complex melding Indo-Saracenic and Kakatiyan architecture at Rs 650 crore. In Andhra Pradesh, state governments have alternated between the need for a centralised and ultra-modern seat of power in Amaravati and the imperative of distributed development. In Bihar, the old Secretariat built during the British Raj in 1915 made way for a state-of-the-art Sachivalaya to represent the new direction of the state.

The latest state where a ruling party is attempting to rebuild a seat of power with its own imprimatur is West Bengal. The dislodged Trinamool Congress government in 2013 shifted administration out of the colonial-era Writers' Buildings in Kolkata to a new building named Nabanna. Now, following its victory in the 2026 assembly elections, the government of Suvendu Adhikari is planning to build a massive new administrative complex in New Town to signal the dawn of a new era.

As it considers its alternatives, the TVK government needs to have clarity on what exactly its own impetus for this project is. It needs to balance its own desire to be grand with the imperatives of efficiency, economy, accessibility and justice. There are some riddles to solve: does an access-controlled edifice really enhance accessibility to people? Why build a concentrated hub when technology allows decentralisation? Can a Rs 1,200 crore project be executed without poor fishermen having to pay a price? Hopefully, the craving for empire will not get the better of the need for efficiency.