Despite impending demolition, Centaur to get facelift

Centaur, the state-owned hotel located near the Delhi airport, will be given a Rs 416.5-million facelift even though it will be demolished after the 2010 Commonwealth Games, official sources said. The sources said the board of the Hotel Corp of India (HCI), which runs the five-star hotel, was in the process of finalising a proposal to pump in Rs 35.15 Crore (Rs 351.5 million) to add more rooms to accommodate the anticipated tourist inflow during the Delhi Games next year.

In fact, the board of HCI, a wholly-owned arm of the National Aviation Co of India that also operates the national carrier Air India, had early last year approved a Rs 6.5 Crore (Rs 65 million) capital expenditure for renovating Centaur. All this has made the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture sceptical. It has now raised apprehensions over the proposal and wants the Civil Aviation Ministry to ensure that the expenditure does not go waste.

Any amount of expenditure for developing Centaur at this stage 'must serve the purpose' as 'the hotel is waiting to be bulldozed in view of the master plan of Indira Gandhi International Airport as planned by Delhi International Airport Ltd', the committee said in a recent report.

DIAL - a consortium comprising infrastructure developers GMR of Bengaluru, Fraport AG of Germany and Malaysia Airport Holding Berhad, as well as the national airports operator, Airports Authority of India - has indicated that the hotel falls on the footprint of the new terminal T3 that is under construction. The first phase of the terminal is scheduled to be completed by 2010, and DIAL says the hotel needed to be demolished for further extension.