Rashtrapati Bhavan, home to the president of the world's largest democracy, epitomizes India's strengths, its democratic traditions and secular character. Rashtrapati Bhavan is a house of four floors and has some 340 rooms of varying sizes. It would take three hours to cover on foot the numerous chambers, anterooms, corridors, courts, galleries, loggias, saloons, staircases, and vestibules, not to mention the kitchens, pantries, ironing rooms, printing press, and theatre. In all, the floor area covers 200,000 square feet (roughly 18,580 square meters). Some 700 million bricks and three million cubic feet of stone have gone into the structure. At the peak of its construction, no fewer than 23,000 labourers worked on the project, among them 3,000 stone-cutters.
