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Mumbai : An ambitious railway project to build about 100 budget hotels across India, with an estimated cost of about Rs 20,000 crore, appears to have been shelved. This project was initially conceptualised by Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) to promote tourism in the country, besides utilising the surplus land of the railways for commercial purposes.
According to a report, the recent decision of the Ministry of Railways to take away of all major responsibilities from IRCTC is likely to throw a spanner on this ambitious project. Out of these proposed budget hotels, three were proposed to be built in Bihar namely in Patna, Gaya and Rajgir.
Each budget hotel was to be built in about 2,000 square metres areas having at least 100 rooms. IRCTC had planned to build budget hotels in all four metros, besides other cities, including Varanasi, Ajmer, Jaipur, Bhubaneswar, Allahabad, Darjeeling, Lucknow, Mysore, Ooty, Puri, Amritsar, Shimla, Ujjain and Udaipur. These places were selected keeping in mind the huge influx of tourists.
An IRCTC official said that the Ministry of Railways recently asked the Railway Land Development Authority (RLDA) to explore the feasibility of building budget hotels on the surplus land of the railways across the country. During the past two years, the RLDA has made no progress in this connection.
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