The 10-storeyed Namakkal Kavignar Maaligai on the campus of Fort St. George in Chennai is in news these days as Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay has decided to move to the 10th floor of the building and function from there.At present, he works from the main block of the 17th century vestige of British rule. Compared to the heritage structure, the Maaligai is a recent building, which is about 50-years old. It houses a number of government departments, providing accommodation to many senior IAS officers and other officials. Over the years, the Maaligai has become a major power centre, as most of the departments are located there. Till the construction of this building, the Secretariat functioned from the main block due to which the government staff enormously suffered for want of space, recalls N. Ganapathy, a veteran journalist who covered the Secretariat for various newspapers between the 1960s and the 1990s.Need for spaceThe need for a multi-storeyed structure to accommodate the growing size of the government was felt even in the late 1950s. On March 24, 1961, the then Finance Minister C. Subramaniam, replying to a question by Mohammed Raza Khan in the now-abolished Legislative Council, stated that there was a proposal by the government to acquire about 2.5 acres of land on the eastern side of the King’s Barracks, located on the north-western side of the main block, and the buildings standing thereon for securing additional accommodation for the Secretariat. He added that the correspondence was going on with the Defence authorities, according to a report of The Hindu on March 27, 1961.However, the proposal did not progress much. The talk of constructing a new structure cropped up when the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s first Chief Minister C.N. Annadurai was in office, Mr. Ganapathy recalls, adding the word went around that he did not relish the idea. Eventually, it was left to his successor, M. Karunanidhi, to pursue the proposal and secure even the Central government’s permission.A veteran archaeologist says the political situation at the national level till 1971 was such that the Congress (Ruling or Requisitionists), led by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was dependent on the support of the DMK in the Lok Sabha for survival. Karunanidhi had used this situation to get the clearance from the Union government.