Page 13 - Parliament of India

Lok Sabha Chamber
The Chamber is of a horse-shoe shaps. In the centre of the straight line connecting the two ends
of ths horse-shos is the Speaker's Chair. The Chamber has a floor area of about 4,800 sq. ft. (about
446 sq. metres) with a seating capacity for 550 members. Seats are divided into six blocks each
having eleven rows. The Chamber is fully air-conditioned and is equipped with modern acoustic
arrangements. The uni-directional low impsndince microphones placed in selected positions
enable a Member to speak from his seat without having to move up to a microphone.
In 1957 the Automatic Vote Recording Equipment was installed at a cost of Rs. 5,85,400 to
facilitate quick recording of votes in a Division. It now takes not more than 4 minutes for a
Division, from the time of ringing of the Division bells to the time of declaratio.i of result.
Speeches delivered in any of the five Indian languages—Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil
and Telugu—are simultaneously translated into English and Hindi. Each seat is provided
with a headphone and a language selector switch through which a Member can listen to the pro­
ceedings in the floor language, or in English or Hindi, when the speech happens to be in any of
the aforesaid five regional languages. The simultaneous interpretation equipment was installed
in 1964 at a cost of Rs. 1,61,800,
(x)