New Parliament House: 900 artisans wove hand-knotted carpets for '10 lakh man-hours'

Premium hand-knotted carpets will decorate the flooring of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha in the new Parliament building. These carpets were painstakingly woven by up to 900 artisans from Uttar Pradesh over the course of '10 lakh man-hours'.

The carpets in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha chambers of the new Parliament building, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi officially opened on Sunday, have magnificent designs of the national birds peacock and lotus.

Weavers created more than 150 carpets each for Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha before sewing them together into a single carpet in the shape of a semi-circle to match the architecture of each of the Houses, which span 35,000 square feet of space, according to Obeetee Carpets, the more than 100-year-old Indian company in charge of the project.

“The weavers 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,” Rudra Chatterjee, Chairman of Obeetee Carpets, said.

While the Rajya Sabha's colour scheme was primarily influenced by the colour kokum red, the Lok Sabha's design was influenced by Indian agave green and Indian peacock plumes.

Laying emphasis on the intricacies of the workmanship, he said that as many as “120 knots per square inch” were woven to create the carpets, totalling “over 600 million knots”.

The Upper and Lower Houses of the new Parliament building now have carpeting thanks to the weavers from Uttar Pradesh's Bhadohi and Mirzapur districts, who put in a whopping '10 lakh man-hours' of labour.

“We began the project in 2020 right in the middle of the pandemic. The weaving process started by September 2021, was over by May, 2022, and the installation commenced in November 2022. Crafting each carpet with a high density of 120 knots per square inch took approximately seven months,” Chatterjee said.