Hotel project near Kuvempu's house shelved

SHIMOGA: The controversial hotel project in front of Jnanpith laureate Kuvempu's house in Shimoga district's Kuppalli has been shelved.
D Subodh, a distant relative of Kuvempu and president of the Devangi gram panchayat in Tirthahalli taluk, had laid the foundation for a hotel in his land opposite the house, which is now a memorial. This kicked off a storm with writers, poets and organizations contending that the hotel, if allowed to come up, would spoil the sanctity of the poet's birthplace.
"I'll stop the construction and remove the foundation,'' he told TOI. Subodh accused Kuvempu Pratishtana, a trust that runs the museum, of misusing funds and illegally allowing a shop-cum-hotel next to the house. "The Pratishtana should shut that hotel too and disallow commercial activity around the house,'' he said.
Subodh and his family had been staying in Kuvempu's ancestral house for a long time. After the poet's death in 1994, the government decided to develop it as a memorial, gave the relatives compensation and got them moved out. It handed over the house to the Kuvempu Pratishtana. The trust framed a bylaw, ruling out commercial activities or private buildings in the vicinity. The trust, with writer HamPa Nagarajaiah as president, manages the memorial with the Rs 4 crore sanctioned by the government.
Controversy erupted when the trust allowed Sudhakar to run a shop-cum-hotel in a house next to the memorial. It was meant to provide visitors beverages and food. The gram panchayat opposed this and served three notices on the trust, asking it to shut down the hotel. "He's making huge sums and nobody bothered about the sanctity of Kuvempu's house. I too thought of constructing a hotel,'' Subodh argued. The trust urged the government to allocate the entire 10 acres to it, its secretary Kadidal Prakash said.