Plans for OGH overhaul remain only on paper

2013 proposal to save the heritage building only hope

As another death-knell has been sounded for the Osmania General Hospital (OGH), a 2013 plan to save the heritage building and improve the medicare in the facility appears to be the only hope. The plan, which has been through multiple iterations, now exists in four formats according to its creators. “We made the plan without compromising the heritage character of the campus. OGH’s visibility and the presence on the site is very important for the city. Architecture is judged by the visibility,” says conservation architect G.S.V. Suryanarayana Murthy about the plan by Kshetra which was submitted in January 2013. This was much before the Telangana government unveiled its plan to pull down the building and build two skyscrapers in their stead in 2015. The architects submitted a 500-page report that detailed every room, ventilator, jack-arch, and later additions to the vast complex. The four plans with one that estimated a ₹345 crore outgo with addition of 91,000 sq metres to ₹535 crore outgo for an addition of 137,450 sq metres are from 2020. The plans involve new buildings spaced around the old heritage site by limiting their height to 19.2 metres.