Mumbai/New Delhi: The 287-room Lemon Tree Premier hotel at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport features a dramatic view of planes landing and taking off, but it has no guests to see them.
The hotel – one of 12 built or planned next to India’s busiest airport at a cost totalling more than $2 billion – has been unable to open as it awaits security clearance from police worried about its proximity to an active runway. The cluster of hotels known as Aerocity, on a site bigger than 40 American football fields, was approved by the government six years ago.
India is eager to attract foreign investment to revive economic growth that is stalling at a decade low and help plug a current account deficit that has widened to a record. Yet bureaucratic hurdles including a lack of coordination among authorities still plague big-ticket projects, such as the hotel development at the capital’s showpiece $3 billion airport.
04/04/13 First Post
