By Express News Service

KALPETTA: It was the start of a revolution when stalwart leader A K Gopalan played a crucial role in the formation of a restaurant chain in the cooperative sector. Decades later, the Indian Coffee House chain has flourished and has grown to an entity earning profits in crores.

Now, the time has come for the next phase of the revolution. For the first time, a five-star hotel is set to come up in the cooperative sector in Wayanad.

An ambitious venture of the Kerala Land Reforms and Development Cooperative Society (LADDER), the multi-crore project is being constructed near Sultan Bathery. Coming up in a sprawling area of over four acres, the hotel cum resort project of the society is being constructed at an estimated cost of Rs 75 crore. The foundation stone for the project has already been laid.

LADDER chairman C N Vijayakrishnan said the project is one of the first such initiatives in the cooperative sector in the country.

“It is Wayanad’s tourism potential which prompted us to begin here,” he said.

According to him, there are no five-star hotels in the district. “Our initiative hence has got more scope to succeed. Also, thousands of tourists travel between Wayanad, Mysore and Bengaluru. Our focus is on this crowd,” he said.

Vijayakrishnan said above all this is the message to all people in the state that “if we stand united nothing is impossible”.

“A five-star hotel owned by a cooperative society is something very big; hard for many to even dream about. But in our case, it is about to become a reality. Everything depends on our unity and perseverance,” he said, adding the group is planning to start theatre complexes as its next step in all major towns.

The project is expected to give much impetus to the tourism map of Wayanad and Karnataka. The hotel will be spread over 1.3 lakh square feet, with 64 rooms and a banquet hall which can accommodate about 400 people at a time. All other facilities such as spa, massage room, gym, restaurants, space for indoor games, boutique, special areas for business meetings are part of the project. The hotel is expected to be complete by January 2020.