JAIPUR: Despite the recently introduced building bylaws by the urban housing department for recognising hotels in residential areas as tourism units, most of these units will remain unregularised.
The industry stated that while complying with rules of not hosting weddings and running rooftop restaurants catering to the general public is easy, the 60-foot road width criterion will create a hurdle for most hotels built decades ago in the vicinity of railways, monuments, and bus stands.
Ranvijay Singh, senior vice-president of Hotel Federation of Rajasthan (HFR), said regularisation of such hotels is necessary to bring them into the mainstream, which will accelerate the process of classification and modernisation of a large number of hotels in Rajasthan and promote tourism in the state. “After regularisation, these hotels will be able to get loans from govt banks at reasonable rates. The govt will also get revenue in the form of conversion charges,” Singh said.
In the absence of any govt policy, people who had extra space available in their homes near transport hubs and monuments started converting their houses into hotels. These hotels were given licences by the municipal corporation and were charged house tax, electricity rates, and other taxes under the commercial category.
The first tourism unit policy came in 2007, allowing the creation of new tourism units on any agricultural or residential land without any land-use conversion fee. For existing tourism units, it was proposed to charge a concessional fee for land-use conversion. However, due to a lack of clear policy guidelines, existing hotels could not take advantage of this.
While these hotels are recognised as tourism units, their land title still remains residential, creating difficulties in running them as an industry. Sources said the UDH department is now planning to bring a separate scheme to regularise them.
