Summary:
Patna, Jul 3 (PTI) Bulldozers on Sunday dismantled a large portion of the historic District Engineer"s Office Building in Patna, on a day a group of citizens gathered in the city to discuss ways to save the threatened Sultan Palace and other heritage buildings from demolition in future.
The irony of the situation could not have been more pronounced as the demolition took place in the centuries-old Patna Collectorate campus while the meeting of heritage lovers happened in a building near the now-razed landmark, close to the iconic Gandhi Maidan.
"A large portion of the old District Engineer"s Office Building was today demolished with bulldozers, which clawed down the historic structure starting from its eastern portion.
I have seen this building since my childhood days, as our small house was just behind it, which also was razed along with other structures of the settlement on the Ganga river bank recently for making a new collectorate complex," said a young local resident, on the condition of anonymity.
He claimed that his grandfather had worked in the District Board Patna, and since then the family had settled in the area located behind the District Engineer"s Office Building, and lamented that "we and so many other families have been uprooted" due to the redevelopment project.
The sturdy District Engineer"s Office Building, said to have been built in the Dutch era, which originally stood as a single-storey elongated structure facing the Ganga with cavernous rooms, high ceilings and hanging skylights.
Few structures were added on the roof to create extra space for offices, sometime in the last hundred years, according to architecture experts.
Patna was a key trading post over three centuries ago, and the Dutch East India Company had built several structures on the banks of Ganga.
The site, from 1857 onwards began being used as the Patna Collectorate by the British, who later owned Dutch-built structures after the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824.
District Board Patna as an institution was set up in 1886.
District Engineer of the Board used to sit in this old building, lending it its name.
A beautiful vintage ceramic plate is also embedded on the top of the southern facade of the District Engineer"s Office Building.
On May 13 this year, Supreme Court had rejected a plea by heritage body INTACH, which was fighting a legal battle since 2019 to save the landmark from demolition, paving the way for the demolition of the Patna Collectorate complex, triggering grief among heritage lovers in India and abroad.
Demolition had started the very next day, and 1938-built District Board Patna Building was the first to receive the blows of the bulldozers.