Ankur Biplav
As many as 900 weavers from Uttar Pradesh’s Bhadohi and Mirzapur spent a total of 10,00,000 man hours in order to carpet the new Parliament building in New Delhi.
The weavers from Obeetee, a hand-woven rug company, crafted a total of 158 carpets for the Lok Sabha and 156 for the Rajya Sabha, which were later stitched together in the form of a semi-circle, spread across 35,000 square feet of the new Parliament building’s area.
The weavers used the ancient art of hand-knotting to create the carpets for the new Parliament building in which 120 knots per square inch were woven to create the carpets—amounting to over 600 million knots in all.
While the carpets in Lok Sabha, based on Indian agave green, have intricate motifs of the peacock, which symbolises the country’s national bird, the ones in Rajya Sabha, inspired by the shade of kokum red, showcase the lotus, which is the national flower. Rudra Chatterjee, chairman, Obeetee carpets, said that creating carpets for the new Parliament building took them over a year and a half.
“We began the project in 2020 during the pandemic and was over by May last year. Crafting each carpet took around seven months and the installation work started in November 2022,” he said.
Chatterjee talked about the challenges faced by the weavers while designing the carpets as they had to craft the carpets for halls measuring up to 17, 500 square feet each.
“This posed a significant challenge for the design team, as they had to meticulously craft the carpet in separate pieces and seamlessly join them together, ensuring that the creative mastery of the weavers blended harmoniously to create a unified carpet that can sustain heavy footfall,” he added.
The new Parliament building will be inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday.