In a matter of months of Budget announcement, construction has begun for the 1,000-bed super-speciality hospital at Sanathnagar. The building is coming up on a plot of land abutting the Government Chest Hospital (GCH) in Erragadda.
“The Chest Hospital will continue to function from where it is functioning and the new super-speciality hospital is an autonomous entity,” said Dr. Mahaboob Khan, the superintendent of GCH.
The chest hospital that was the repurposed Irramnuma Palace built in 1888 has been left intact. A portion of the 65-acre wooded area is now a vast building site teeming with workers, earthmovers, pile drivers, concrete mixing machines with piles of sand and rubble.
“All the small buildings in the area have been broken down a month back. A new big hospital is being built there,” says an employee of Hyderabad Metro who has a bird’s eye view of the site.
The model of the building that is coming up on the site tips its hat to the Irramnuma Palace. The length, four pediments and columnar plan on the lower floor of the hospital resembles the old palace. It lists Hafeez Contractor as the architect and Megha Engineering and Infrastructure Ltd as the contractors.
The initial plan of the Telangana Government was to build the new Secretariat at the site considering that the 670-bed hospital occupied barely one acre in a plot of land that was 65 acres.
The palace built as a hunting lodge by Fakhrul Mulk had corridors that stretched over 125 metres with Saracenic column capitals and horseshoe arches. As pointed out by architect Sibghat Khan, it had the builder Fakhrul Mulk’s name inscribed in Kufic script over the main portico showing influence of Moorish order on the design.
The Chest Hospital inaugurated by the then Prime Minister Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru on September 24, 1952 christened as Tuberculosis Hospital within four years of Operation Polo that led to merger of Hyderabad in Indian Union. Lack of maintenance brought about the ruin of the building which developed leaks and had vegetal growth ill-suited to patient care and was abandoned in 2011.
The construction of the new 1,000-bed hospital, leaving the old heritage building intact, is a model that the State government can follow while rebuilding a new modern facility at Osmania General Hospital (OGH). Recently, the State government had filed an affidavit with the Telangana High Court about its plans to demolish OGH and build new hospital at the site on its 35 acres.
