Bijay Charak
Jammu, Jan 10: Angered over faulty restoration of Mubarak Mandi Heritage Complex (MMHC), executive members of Mubarak Mandi Heritage Society today visited the palace and stopped the restoration work. The members including former Mayor Narinder Singh Jamwal and former Corporator Zafar Javed Khan today visited the complex area and objected to the technique being used by Tourism department to restore the Raja Ram Singh Palace building. "The labourers were making holes in the walls of Raja Ram Singh Palace to make scaffold. Digging holes in the old building was like vandalizing the ancient structure", the executive members said, adding that the job of Tourism department was to restore the structure but not to damage the same. "After seeing the restoration work being done by Tourism department, we feel that they were vandalizing the structure as earlier, when Archeological Survey of India (ASI) had done restoration of other structures and they had not made any hole in the walls and had made steel structure to start restoration works", Narinder Singh said, adding that it was very unfortunate that a monitoring committee was also constituted, which was assigned the monitoring work, but same had not been doing anything. Zafar Javed Khan informed that they immediately phoned to Executive Engineer and asked him to stop the work as the technique was damaging the structure. Taking serious view of the development, they said: "Until corrective measures will not be adopted by Tourism department, restoration work will not be allowed to start." Castigating the working of Tourism department, they said, that Tourism
department has shown dismal performance in restoration work, so far. Director Tourism, Soujanay Sharma said that the executive members had objected over the technique being used for restoration work. "We had called Structure Engineer of consultant company, who instructed the workers to use another technique, following which the restoration remained continue", he said. |
