Melbourne, Dec 24 (ANI): The ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas, where the Beatles came to study and compose, is being proposed to be turned into a home and school for street kids.

Famously known as 'Beatles Ashram', the facility is located in Rishikesh.

Maggie O'Hara, a former Hollywood actress who has lived in India running schools for the poor for the past 30 years, has submitted a plan to the Government to turn the ashram into a home and school for 2500 street children from Delhi.

O'Hara is also planning to open a job training and rehabilitation centre for 500 women.

Ten of the 500 rooms would be used as an eco-hotel, where guests could volunteer to work with the children or simply relax in the same ashram where late Sir John Lennon searched for the meaning of life, and George Harrison worked to perfect his sitar playing.

The campus, filled with overgrown weeds and slowly being destroyed by desperately poor villagers who loot the teak furnishings and sell them for firewood, has been vacant for 12 years.

Although the Government has taken it over, O'Hara believes the property had been neglected.

"Helping India's children would be in the spirit of what the Beatles were in India searching for: generosity, optimism, kindness," theage.com.au quoted her, as saying in a report in the Washington Post.

"It's a terrible shame that the Beatles' ashram is lying in waste. This could become a model for other centres that could be built like it around the country," she added.

'The Beatles' journeyed to Rishikesh in the foothills of the Himalayas in the late Sixties. They were at the height of their fame, but they came to escape material wealth and the pressures of celebrity. (ANI)