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Custom, Handmade

Obeetee Supplied Hand-Knotted Carpets for India's New Parliament Building

An Obeetee team of 900 rug weavers spent a staggering one million man-hours to hand-knot the carpets for the Upper and Lower Houses of India's new Parliament building.

RugNews.com Editors
6/9/2023
obeetee carpet in lndia's new Parliament building lower house Lok Sabha Indian
Obeetee Carpets hand-knotted 150 area rugs to create the carpet for India's new Parliament building.
Shown, Lok Sabha [Lower House] (All photos courtesy Central Vista Redevelopment Project)

NEW DEHLI -- Obeetee Carpets, commissioned to carpet both the Upper and Lower Houses of India's new Parliament building, enlisted 900 artisan weavers to craft these hand-knotted carpets.

The weavers put in approximately "10 lakh [1 million] man-hours" to create hand-knotted carpets for the halls of both the Rajya Sabha [Upper House] and Lok Sabha [Lower House] of India's just-completed new Parliament building.

Rudra Chatterjee, chairman of Obeetee Carpets, noted that weavers crafted more than 150 carpets each for Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, which were then stitched together into a single carpet in the form of a semi-circle.

"The weavers had to craft the carpets for halls measuring up to 17,500 square feet each," Chatterjee stated. "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."


Obeetee's 900 weavers hand-knotted the high density rugs in 120 KPSI to create a durable carpet. Shown, Rajya Sabha [Upper House]

"Crafting each carpet with a high density of 120 knots per square inch took approximately seven months, totalling over 600 million knots," Chatterjee said.

The halls' motifs drew inspiration from India's nation bird, the peacock, for the Los Sabha, and its national flower, the lotus, for the Rajya Sabha. And the colours used in Rajya Sabha carpet was primarily inspired by kokum, a pomegranate colored fruit grown in India's Goa and Konkan regions, while the palette of the Lok Sabha carpet is based on Indian agave green, with inspirations from the plumes of the Indian peacock.


Obeetee Carpets' weavers carefully stitched together the 150 area rugs created for the Lower House.
 
Obeetee began the project in the middle of 2020 during the Covid pandemic, with weaving kicking off in September 2021. The carpets were completed May, 2022, and installation began in November 2022.

The new triangular Parliament House is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s $2.8 billion Central Vista Redevelopment Project. The new building replaces the original parliament building, constructed nearly 100 years ago, and dramatically expands the two chambers of the Parliment.


Just completed, India's new Parliament House in New Delhi replaced an original structure built almost 100 years ago.
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