Magnificent Extensions

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><root available-locales="en_US," default-locale="en_US"><static-content language-id="en_US"><![CDATA[<p>There are satellites and satellites. Some towns have been planned to serve specific commercial needs of the mother city, such as HITEC City in Hyderabad; and there are those that have naturally evolved from villages or small transport hubs such as Faridabad or Pimpri-Chinchwad near Pune. Here, we sample five typical satellite cities on India's fast-expanding urbanscape.<br><br><strong>Delhi's Two Sparkling Satellites</strong><br>While the North Okhla Industrial Development Authority (Noida) was a planned greenfield development, Gurgaon has been spurred on by private developers such as DLF and Unitech. Noida, though just 20 km south east of Delhi across the Yamuna, is part of Uttar Pradesh's Gautam Budh Nagar district. Spread over 20,316 hectares, it was created as an integrated township with planned sectors. About 36 per cent was set apart for residences, sector 18 for markets, and another 175 acres for an industrial zone. There is also the 200-acre Noida City Centre under development that will serve as the city's hub with hotels and corporate parks.<br><br>Gurgaon, 30 km south of Delhi, has a more chaotic history and developed from a rustic Haryanvi small town to a swanky corporate and mall city. Unlike Noida, its development was driven by acquisition of farm lands by developers who initially set up corporate offices and attracted companies to glass-clad buildings close to both the international airport as well as to the seat of power. Says Anshuman Magazine of broking house CB Richard Ellis: "Gurgaon is the last in a long line of satellite extensions of Delhi - first there was Vasant Kunj and then Rohini, and Dwaraka in the 1980s and 1990s." <br><br><img src="/businessworld/system/files/Whitefield_Bornali-B1_250x187.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 6px;" height="187" width="250">Gurgaon is a typical example of urban infrastructure being retrofitted after malls and corporate parks came up. The 1990s and early 2000s saw an influx of multinationals to Gurgaon, but infrastructure linkages came much later. Other civic facilities like electricity, water and public transport are a nightmare even now.<br><br><strong>Boom And Bust At Whitefield </strong><br>Whitefield is a name synonymous in the real estate lexicon with crashing property prices. The small village in eastern Bangalore made a name as a retirement enclave for the Anglo-Indian community in the 1980s. Its growth impetus came from being selected as Bangalore's first planned technology hub. Tata Elxsi was the first to move into Whitefield, followed by IT and ITES giants such as TCS, Accenture and Wipro.<br><br>Developed by Ascendas, the largest and best known IT campus in Whitefield is the International Tech Park (ITPB). It went onstream in 1998, and hosts nearly 250 firms and 350,000 professionals. Spread over 26 acres, it is the first hi-tech park to create the integrated 'work and play' environment through its six posh towers. Supporting Whitefield's large IT community is a clutch of upscale hotels such as the Vivanta by Taj, Hilton Whitefield and Mapple Resorts.<br><br>Expectedly, Whitefield saw a residential boom with all of Bangalore's developers frenetically constructing homes for what they saw as a bottomless IT market. The result: heavy over-supply. With the IT industry at a standstill during the 2008-09 recession, Whitefield was among the worst hit. At one point, prices in the enclave fell 40-50 per cent from the highs of Rs 4,000-4,500 per sq. ft. Currently, residential housing has recovered to a Rs 3,500-4,000 per-sq. ft range, but still far below the boom-time highs.<br>break-page-break<br><strong>Navi Mumbai: A Dormitory Town </strong><br>New Bombay, or Navi Mumbai as it is known now, has been in gestation since 1964, but has prospered only in the past decade. Planned as a 'Twin City on Water' with several nodes linked along the railroad across the harbour, it covers about 345 sq. km. spread over Raigad and Thane districts. It probably has succeeded in absorbing 2 million or more people that may have gone on to crowd Mumbai, but most other targets have remained on paper. Rahul Mehrotra of non-profit Urban and Regional Development Institute (UDRI) notes the government never moved to Navi Mumbai as was originally planned. This deprived the new city of the core catalyst that would have propelled autonomous growth. Ultimately, Navi Mumbai remained dependent economically on the mother city, becoming a 'dormitory' suburb with trainloads of commuters shuttling in and out of Mumbai every day. <br><br><img src="/businessworld/system/files/Khargher_Navi-Mumbai_SN_250x187.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 9px;" height="187" width="250">"With prices touching Rs 10,000-12,000 a sq. ft, even Navi Mumbai has become out of reach for middle classes over the past 5-6 years," says UDRI's Pankaj Joshi. Sirish Patel, structural engineer and one of the original trio of planners that conceived Navi Mumbai, told BW he would give the satellite city 3 marks on a scale of 10. "The only area it has succeeded in is it is self-financing through land sale," says Patel. But Mehrotra grudgingly concedes: "New Bombay, yet, holds the hope for structured growth in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region." <br><br><strong>Rajarhat, Kolkata's Modern Hub</strong><br>Salt Lake City in Kolkata was conceived in the 1960s as a 3,000-acre township for middle-class housing and an infotech hub. It was built by filling up tanks of old fisheries by dredging slurry from the Hooghly river. Then came the bigger and better Rajarhat Newtown in the north-west of the city. Today, Rajarhat is a planned layout of 7,625 acres, nearly two-and-a-half times that of Salt Lake City. It integrates high-quality residential complexes, an IT and electronics hub, and malls and retail outlets. For Kolkata, ever suffering from traffic snarls, Rajarhat has given an alternative route to the airport, giving it a geographical advantage.<br><br><img src="/businessworld/system/files/Rajarhat_Kolkata1_BB_250x187.jpg" style="float: left; margin: 9px;" height="187" width="250">Rajarhat has been carved out with four action areas stretching from Salt Lake Sector V to the Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Airport. Land was allotted to developers such as DLF, Bengal Shrachi, Ambuja Realty and Bengal Peerless. City Centre: Newtown, for instance, has a 400,000-sq. ft mall by Ambuja Realty that has a catchment area spread over Kolkata's outskirts of Ultadanga, Baguiati, Dum Dum, Barasat and Birati. Axis Mall, by Bengal Peerless, targets the prospective 200,000 IT professionals.<br><br>The recession hit real estate activity hard and many of the 7-8 malls in the pipeline have been converted to commercial space. While many ser-vice and office complexes have got operational, the success of the township will depend on how fast residential projects can go live. Retail sales are dependent on a high density of high-income, residential population, and it remains to be seen if Rajarhat will become another Gurgaon.<br><br>gurbir(dot)singh(at)abp(dot)in<br><br>(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 20-06-2011)<br><br></p>