New Gandhinagar station to be ready by September 2019

AHMEDABAD: The Rs 550-crore project, the Leela Palace Hotel in Gandhinagar, which will also incorporate a railway station, has been pushed back and will now be inaugurated in September 2019. The railways and the state government wanted to inaugurate the hotel and railway station in 2019, along with the Vibrant Gujarat 2019 summit.
Officials said that the target date for the redeveloped station was February 2019, while the five-star hotel built over it would be complete by September 2019.Officials in the railways said that during a recent review of the project by Ashwani Lohani, the chairman of the Railway Board, the railways announced that construction would not be complete before Vibrant Gujarat 2019.
Officials said that the chairman had directed that civil work of the hotel project should be complete by February 2019 and the hotel should be finished by the end of September 2019.
A senior Gujarat government official associated with the project said that the Gujarat government requested that the 300-room five-star hotel be ready before the Vibrant Gujarat summit in January 2019. The officer said that since 77-metre-high hotel needs time for the civil work, it will not be completed in time. The officer added that the railway station will also not be ready by January 2019.
The officer said that to complete the project before January, the special purpose vehicle for the project, the Gandhinagar Railway and Development Corporation Ltd (GARUD), had allowed the use of innovative construction technology with each floor or slab of the building being constructed in a four or five-day cycle.
Officials said that a five star hotel with 300 rooms usually takes four years to complete, but the Railway authorities and contractors are planning to finish it by 2019, which would be half the time usually taken usually for such projects.