The view of the multipurpose hall at Hanging Garden in Salem Corporation in Tamil Nadu on Tuesday, 20 February 2024.
| Photo Credit: LAKSHMI NARAYANAN E
After ten failed attempts to find a lessee, the Salem Corporation, after drastically reducing the lease amount in its eleventh attempt, was finally able to lease out its multi-purpose hall in Hanging Garden.
Constructed at a cost of ₹11.80 crore under the Smart City Mission, the Salem Corporation had in 2020 fixed ₹6 crore as the yearly lease amount and ₹3 crore as deposit amount for the multi-purpose hall, and floated tenders in late 2020 and early 2021. With nobody coming forward, the corporation fixed ₹5 lakh as rent for 24 hours and ₹3 lakh for 12 hours, in addition to maintenance charges of ₹30,000 and ₹13 per unit of electricity. The Corporation then reduced the rent to ₹3 lakh per day, but it still found few takers.
Late in 2021, another tender was floated with ₹4.50 crore as lease amount and ₹2.25 crore as deposit amount, but failed to meet any positive response. Revised tenders were floated in January, April, June, and December 2022, and February and June 2023, with ₹2.50 crore as lease amount and ₹75 lakh as deposit amount, but the response was muted once again. In the three years since the hall was opened, only government functions were held.
Following this, the corporation, after collecting rental fares of big wedding halls in Salem, brought down the lease amount to ₹1 crore and ₹25 lakh as deposit. In its eleventh attempt, it finally found a lessee. The concerned people who took the hall for lease will fix the rent for the hall, which could be anywhere between ₹2 lakh and ₹2.50 lakh, corporation officials said.