Lucknow bench's new building to be inaugurated on March 19

Lucknow: The iconic new building of the Lucknow bench of Allahabad High Court (HC) will be inaugurated by Vice-President Hamid Ansari on March 19, an official said on Thursday.

Chief Justice of India T.S.Thakur will also be present at the event. Foundation of the new, sprawling state-of-art building was laid by the then chief justice K.G. Balakrishnan on December 30, 2009. The older building was built in 1903.

Spread over a 40-acre plot, the new building has 57 court rooms with 72 chambers for judges and has an office for the advocate general, 1440 chambers for lawyers and a library. Separate facility has been made available to accommodate 2,240 typists and lawyers'' assistants, besides a sitting room for drivers.

According to a high court spokesman, the new building has a meeting hall with a capacity of 500. The five-storey building also boasts of a three-tier underground parking facility with a capacity for 5,000 four-wheelers and 15,000 two-wheelers. Besides multiple lifts, escalators are also installed in each wing of the building.

Among other facilities, the building includes a guest house, a club house, canteen, a dispensary as well as an independent Computerised Railway Reservation Centre. The work on the campus was to be completed in March 2015 but got delayed by a year.

Registrar General of the Allahabad HC, S.K.Singh Rathore however informed that judicial work will not immediately start in the new building and would take some time.