The Hindu : Front Page : Hotel project to be shifted to Budvel

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jun 25, 2007
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Hotel project to be shifted to Budvel

M.L. Melly Maitreyi

Hyderabad: There is some good news for environment conservation enthusiasts. The much touted Hotel Corridor project, ‘Regal Broadway’, proposed in the vicinity of the International Airport at Shamshabad, will now move to Budvel as the Government apparently is not in favour of the demand for revision of GO 111 to facilitate commercial activities.

The Government had indicated last August that GO 111, a decree that governs development activity around the catchment areas of Osmansagar and the Himayatsagar, will be revised to bring clarity to the various interpretations of the decree.

Safe option

GO 111 identifies 84 villages upstream of Himayatsagar and Osmansagar and prohibits polluting industries, major hotels, residential colonies or any pollution-causing establishments there. It also prohibits polluting industries that cause acidification of the lake waters within a 10 km radius around the reservoirs. Yet the GO was subjected to different interpretations by different wings of the Government. The anticipated revision of GO 111 had enthused the realtors that it would free the existing and future projects from legal and environmental objections and give a fillip to the massive commercial activities in the so far prohibited areas.

HUDA too which had waited the Government’s clarification to go ahead with its prestigious project for housing star and budget hotels has now decided it would be safer to shift the project to Budvel which was not among the 84 villages notified under GO 111. HUDA’s 150-acre layout at Shamshabad was in the upstream area of the reservoirs.

“More or less the same extent of land would be allotted for the hotel corridor project at Budvel, where another HUDA project ‘Menefer’, a super premium villa layout meant for NRIs and high net worth individuals would come up,” according to HUDA Vice-Chairman Jayesh Rajan.

With the shifting of hotel project from Shamshabad, the 150-cre HUDA layout would now be again a purely residential layout as originally proposed under its ‘Sites and Services’ scheme.

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