Centre Begins Historic Relocation of 30,000 Employees

The orders issued this month have selected Ministries ranging from Home Affairs under Amit Shah to Rural Development, headed by Shivraj Singh Chouhan, to move to Building 3 – currently named CCS-03 – on Kartavya Path. The scale of the shift will be even larger than when most of Lutyens’ Delhi’s present crop of Government buildings came up in the early 1930s. The biggest relocation of Central Government employees in New Delhi has begun, with orders issued for several departments to move to one of the new buildings constructed on Rajendra Prasad Road.

The orders issued this month by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs are just the first batch. While both the Home Ministry and the Department of Personnel and Training from North Block have been asked to shift to their new address, the Finance Ministry has not been picked. Since no timeline has been mentioned in the order for when the first set of nine Ministries and Departments must complete the move, it is clear that Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman will present her next Budget from North Block as well. The order has picked and chosen departments from almost every building on both sides of Kartavya Path, which runs from Rashtrapati Bhavan to India Gate. Almost every major Central Government office is housed in one of the buildings lining both sides of this boulevard. These include the Ministries of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises; Rural Development and Land Resources; and the office of the Principal Scientific Advisor, located in the Vigyan Bhawan Annexe. The Vigyan Bhawan complex itself will be reconstructed. Estimates based on staff strength indicate that nearly 30,000 Government employees will move into the new building by this August.

As part of the Central Vista renovation, three buildings have been built on the north side of the boulevard, but only one of them will be occupied for now. Each of these buildings is six storeys high. Among the plans for the Central Vista Redevelopment, North Block and South Block on Raisina Hill are expected to be transformed into an expanded National Museum. With North Block almost vacated, its refashioning will now pick up pace. The Ministry of External Affairs will also vacate its offices in South Block to move to the new building 3, located almost at the other end of Kartavya Path.

The Ministry’s Media Division, currently at Shastri Bhawan, will also move to the new office. The main office of the Ministry of External Affairs, headed by S. Jaishankar and located at Jawahar Bhawan across the boulevard, will remain untouched. In the 1920s and ’30s, staff and officers of the Central Government had moved from the area where Delhi University and the Delhi Vidhan Sabha now stand, to the current set of offices on Central Vista — housed in North Block, South Block, Udyog Bhawan and Krishi Bhawan. The other buildings further down the road, such as Nirman Bhawan and Shastri Bhawan, came up in the 1960s and ’70s. The scale of staff movements after that first round was much slower.