Agartala, March 29: Reclining on his chair, Speaker Ramendra Debnath had been sweating profusely, having scaled staircases of the Assembly building several times for photo sessions with the cabinet members, MLAs of the ruling party and the Opposition and 393 employees of Tripura Legislative Assembly.

It was the last day of the Assembly’s sitting within the royal Ujjayanta Palace where the peoples’ house had shifted on January 27, 1972. It is now being shifted to the newly constructed building in the new capital complex, 5km north of Agartala, which the Speaker and the members of the cabinet will visit tomorrow morning.“The photo sessions were a bit tiresome because I am a heart patient but you can not help it on such a day as this; I am also somewhat nostalgic as I have been an MLA since 1993 and Speaker since 2003,” said Debnath.

Veteran MLAs and staff recalled many events in the Assembly over the past 38 years. “I still remember what former chief minister Sukhamay Sengupta and the then leader of the Opposition, Nripen Chakraborty, said on the opening day of the budget session on February 26, 1972. Chakraborty had not taken kindly to the shifting of the Assembly to the palace and said he smelt blood and gore in it. To this, the chief minister had said why the leader of the Opposition had arrived at the Assembly to smell blood and gore which was available in plenty in the hills and plains of Tripura?” said Kalidas Bhattacharya, retired record-keeper of the Assembly.

As a Union territory, Tripura had been conferred with an Assembly comprising 30 elective and two nominated seats by the Union home ministry in July 1963. But when Tripura became a full-fledged state on January 21, 1972, along with Meghalaya and Manipur, the strength of the Assembly went up to 60 with the reservation of 20 seats for Scheduled Tribes and seven seats for Scheduled Castes.

The first two sessions of the full-fledged Assembly were held in the building, which is currently being used by Tripura Public Service Commission. Space constraints in the old assembly building had compelled chief minister Sukhamay Sengupta to open discussion with the scion of the royal family, late Kirit Bikram Kishore Manikya, to acquire a part of the Ujjayanta Palace. The deal happened quickly and the Assembly was shifted to the palace on January 27, 1972.