By Rajesh Saha: With just a day to go for Poila Baishakh, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee gave people of Kolkata a reason to rejoice this Bengali New Year by inaugurating a six-storey state-of-the-art indoor cultural complex called Dhanadhanyo auditorium in the city’s Alipore area on Thursday.

The speciality of this auditorium—a brainchild of CM Mamata Banerjee–is that it is designed in the form of a conch shell. It has taken about 600 workers close to seven years to complete the auditorium constructed at an estimated cost of Rs 440 crores.

The Public Works Department of the state government built the auditorium, which will be maintained by Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation (HIDCO).

A mini auditorium, banquet, street corner theatre, food court, parking and multipurpose hall are available inside the auditorium. There are two separate auditoriums inside Dhanadhanyo. One of them has a seating capacity for maximum 2,000 viewers while the other has about 450 seats. There is an open theater with the capacity to seat more than 300 people.

The inside of the auditorium is an iron structure topped with a coating of zinc that was sourced from Germany, said sources.

The lights used for illuminating the auditorium have been sourced from Japan. The height of the auditorium is about 600 feet.

Expensive stones were brought from Surat in Gujarat to build the auditorium. Sources in the know of the matter said six thousand metric tonnes of steel have been used to make the main structure.

After inaugurating the Dhanadhanyo auditorium, Mamata Banerjee said, “This modern marvel is a symbol of progress and development in our state.”