Centre to sell eight ITDC hotels

New Delhi: The government will soon privatise eight loss-making hotels run by India Tourism Development Corporation (ITDC) as it plans to “offload” all the sick units, tourism minister Mahesh Sharma said.“We propose that all our sick units need to be offloaded. Out of 16 hotels, eight are in very bad shape and we propose to disinvest it in the very first phase. It is not wise to bear the burden of these loss-making units,” Mr Sharma said.

“The ball has started rolling,” he said, adding that the formal process should begin within two months. However, he ruled out the possibility of selling off ‘The Ashok’, the flagship property of ITDC in the capital.“Ashok will not be on the block. We are trying to revamp it and this year we will make it a profitable venture,” the minister said. The Ashok alone incurred a loss of about Rs 13 crore in 2014-15, while other ITDC hotels together ran up losses of about Rs15 crore.

Currently ITDC, a PSU under the tourism ministry, runs 16 hotels including three in Delhi and the rest in Jammu, Ranchi, Bhubaneswar, Puri, Patna, Bhopal, Bharatpur, Jaipur, Guwahati, Pondicherry, Mysore and Itanagar.The eight hotels which are likely to go under the hammer include those at Jaipur, Bhubaneswar, Puri, Jammu, Guwahati, Ranchi, Pondicherry and the Lalitha Mahal hotel in Mysore.