Budget Railway hotel at Darjeeling Station

Good news for visitors to the region.

The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), in partnership with a Delhi-based developer group, will build budget hotels at Darjeeling and New Jalpaiguri (NJP) stations.

The IRCTC had floated tenders seeking expression of interest from private firms to build budget hotels in 20 towns across the country, including NJP, Darjeeling and Sealdah in Bengal.

All the hotels will be located close to the stations.

Zoom Royal Orchid Consortium, the Delhi-based developer group, bagged the contract to build 11 of these hotels, including the two in north Bengal (the others are at Chandigarh, Tirupathi, Nagpur, Agra, Pune, Bhopal, Jodhpur, Udaipur and Bikaner). The group will spend Rs 350 crore on the projects.

Both the hotels in this region will be built on the station campus, said Alex George, who is handling public relations for Zoom. “At NJP, the hotel will be constructed over 4,225 square metres and will have 100 rooms. The one in Darjeeling will have 20 rooms over 570 square metres,” he said. The projects costs will be Rs 12.23 crore and Rs 2.20 crore respectively.

George added that work on both the hotels is likely to start by the first week of September. “Architects have been finalised and we await approvals from the authorities concerned,” he said. “All 11 projects are expected to be completed within 18 months.”

IRCTC officials said the room tariff and other details were yet to be finalised.

“Nine other hotels will be built by two major realtors of Mumbai. The sites have been selected on the basis of the volume of passenger traffic and importance of stations located close to tourism sites,” an IRCTC official said.

Among the other sites are Secunderabad, Madurai, Vijayawada, Ooty, Rameshwaram, Jaisalmer and Kanyakumari, he added.

This is the third IRCTC project in north Bengal. Earlier, they had opened a food plaza at NJP station and an office in Siliguri, from where people can charter trains of all three gauges, including the Toy Train.

Source: The Telegraph