Thanks for the help. I was able to download the model via wget but i encountered a another issue while deploying the app. It was related to transforms. While debugging i could see that the starter code for Google App Engine uses a deprecated method for making inference ImageDataBunch.single_from_classes. Check the source code for mode details.
So I have modified my server.py to use load_learner and used export.pkl file instead of using model.pth file. After that I was able to deploy the app to app engine and it is up and running now.