JEDDAH: Ordinary pilgrims may find it harder to attend the regular prayers at the Grand Mosque in coming years, as residential projects under construction in the central area of the holy city will only be affordable to the wealthy.

“This year a considerable number of pilgrims, particularly the elderly and weak, who were accommodated in districts away from the Grand Mosque found it hard to travel to the mosque complex five times a day for congregational prayers. But on occasions when they did come, they preferred to remain there until all of the day’s prayers were over. This tendency added to crowding in the Grand Mosque,” said Uthman Sago, an employee of the Indonesian Umrah Tour Organizing Company.

About 800 hotels and residential facilities have been demolished in the Shamiya, Shubaika and Gazza districts in the central area of Makkah as part of new development projects under way there. Consequently, pilgrims had to be accommodated in far away neighborhoods, such as Al-Hamra, Rusaifah Street, the Second Ring Road, Haj Street, Al-Jazair Street and the Industrial Zone.

Muhsin Al-Habshi, an official of a tawafa establishment, said the accommodation plan for pilgrims had undergone a radical change with the demolition of old buildings and the launching of new residential projects in the central area of Makkah.

He expressed fears that the new buildings would be affordable only to the wealthy.

“Millions of ordinary pilgrims may have to look for buildings at places kilometers away in the city’s suburbs where accommodation is cheap,” Al-Habshi said.

He said the proposed expansion of the Grand Mosque would necessitate construction of new low-cost residential towers in the city’s suburbs. “Only large scale construction in such districts would provide the required accommodation for pilgrims during the Haj and Umrah seasons,” he said.

He added that several Asian Haj delegations arranged their accommodations this year in remote districts because of the comparatively cheap rates there.

He also said a good part of pilgrim-related business activities would gradually be shifting to the new locations where new shopping centers and restaurants would have to be built.

“In the light of more and more expansion projects planned for the central area, investors may turn to the outlying areas of the city in future,” said Abdullah Al-Mashat, a leading a property developer in Makkah.

Al-Mashat added that the number of Haj and Umrah pilgrims are set to increase in coming years and is projected to cross 40 million by 2020.