Bangalore’s monuments to get a facelift soon

Bangalore’s monuments to get a facelift soon
Vijay Times

Bangalore: The monumental public buildings in the City are all set to get a facelift thanks to the efforts of the Bangalore-based Surface Restoration Protection Technologies (SRPT), which has adopted a unique technology to rejuvenate old stone buildings.

With most of the stone buildings, considered as monumental structures, loosing their charm after being affected by soot and dust due to the increasing pollution levels, SRPT innovated the ‘Restoklenz Formulation’ -- a chemical salt solution used with balanced liquid compounds and applied without dilution on dry stony surfaces with a brush, roller or a spray -- to clean them up.

The technique was tried on the 1935-built Puttanna Chetty Town Hall in 2003 after it was successfully used on the 1920-built Little Sisters Orphanage Church and two other old churches in the City.

SRPT founder G Suresh Kumar says that most of the monumental buildings in the City will be washed using the technique. Among these buildings are the Ravindra Kalakshetra and the LIC Jeevan Prakash buildings where work is going on for the past two months. The Bangalore City Corporation building will also be washed using the same chemical.

G Venugopal, assistant engineer of PWD, said that the work at Ravindra Kalakshetra had been taken up at a cost of Rs 5 lakh. The SRPT’s effort is being supported technically by the Ed Bleick Chemical Co Inc (USA), which introduced this technology in India last year. Vidhana Soudha, also a monumental structure, is not blackening as the building gets washed thrice a year with water.

The advantage of this technique is that it does not require heavy, expensive and specialised equipment such as compressors and pumps. Kumar says it is considered the greatest advance in surface cleaning and has been around in the US for the last 50 years.