Lotus motif for RS, peacock for LS: 900 artisans from UP weaved carpet for new Parliament building

Premium hand-knotted carpets weaved laboriously by as many as 900 artisans from Uttar Pradesh for a whopping ”10 lakh man-hours” will adorn the floors of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha in the new Parliament building.

The new Parliament building, to be inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday, will showcase exquisite motifs of national bird peacock and national flower lotus in the carpets of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, respectively.

Obeetee Carpets, the over-100-year-old Indian company behind the project, said weavers crafted more than 150 carpets each for Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha ”before stitching them into a single carpet in the form of a semi-circle to sync with the architecture of each of the Houses spread across 35,000 square feet of area”.

”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 colours used in Rajya Sabha has been primarily inspired by the shade of kokum red, the look of Lok Sabha is based on Indian agave green with inspirations from the plumes of the Indian peacock. 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 weavers, hailing from Uttar Pradesh’s Bhadohi and Mirzapur districts, have spent a whopping ”10 lakh man-hours” to carpet the Upper and Lower Houses of the new Parliament building. ”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.