Howrah Town Hall after the roof caved in a year ago. A Telegraph picture

A year after the collapse of the 142-year-old Howrah Town Hall on January 4, 2004, restoration work on the heritage structure is yet to start.

?We know we should take up the repair and restoration of the town hall immediately. But we are severely short of funds. We need Rs 80 lakh to restore the 2,500-sq-ft ceiling,? said a Howrah Municipal Corporation (HMC) official on Thursday.

Howrah mayor Gopal Mukherjee, however, held out the assurance that all arrangements had been made and the restoration will begin soon.

?It is high time we restored the structure, because with the passage of time, the open roof, now covered with a sheet of tarpaulin, will expose the structure to the harsher elements of nature,? said the Howrah mayor.

He added that the HMC was eager to restore the town hall, as the two-storeyed building was associated with many historic events attended by famous people.

The Howrah Town Hall was constructed by the British and was utilised as a community hall for hosting functions. The building has witnessed literary stalwarts like Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay walk through its portals.

The HMC declared the building a heritage structure in 2001 and since then, HMC officials claim, it was well-maintained. A team of experts had earlier attributed the roof cave-in to ?non-intentional negligence? on the part of the civic body.

After the roof collapsed, the state government had formed a four-member committee, led by Prof Bikash Chandra Chatterjee, the head of the department of civil engineering of Bengal Science and Engineering University (formerly BE College), in Shibpur, to find out the cause.

The committee filed a report within a few weeks, stating that the municipal authorities were negligent in maintaining the town hall.

The committee suggested that the HMC could have used non-destructive testing to find out the inner condition of the iron beams that supported the roof. The main cause cited by the team was decay of the materials used to construct the roof. The iron beams had, apparently, rusted and lost their load-bearing capacity.

Also, ever since the town hall collapsed, the municipal court, that had been functioning from a portion of the hall, has remained closed. No attempts have been made by the civic authorities to relocate it.

?The mayor must look into the matter or else we will start an agitation,? said Sujit Chatterjee, a member of the criminal bar association in Howrah. ?We have also submitted a deputation to Howrah district judge Shyamal Chakraborty to take immediate action in this regard,? Chatterjee said.

A copy of the deputation was submitted to the district magistrate, too.

The lawyers in the Howrah court observed a Black Day on Thursday and demanded immediate restoration of the hall. They alleged that important documents of the municipal court had been ?either stolen or damaged? in the course of the past year.