Adani’s North Mumbai project to cost US$11 billion: official

[MUMBAI] The Adani Group could invest as much as US$11 billion to build homes and offices in North Mumbai, as the ports-to-power conglomerate expands its real estate footprint in India’s financial capital.

The 58-hectare project – the size of roughly 108 football fields – located in the Goregaon suburb, will entail building homes for thousands of existing residents and businesses. Adani Realty, the privately-held real estate arm of the Adani Group, will also build affordable housing units and public infrastructure such as roads, water and electricity lines. 

“The total project could cost up to a trillion rupees,” Sanjeev Jaiswal, chief executive officer of the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA), said on the sidelines of a conference on Friday (Apr 17). Around 360 billion rupees (S$5 billion) of this would go towards rehabilitation and the affordable housing segment, he added.

In return for developing the area and rehabilitating its residents, Adani Realty can build houses and offices on about two-thirds of the land available for development, and sell those on the open market, Jaiswal noted. 

Adani Group did not respond to queries sent by Bloomberg. 

Over the years, billionaire Gautam Adani’s group has steadily deepened its presence in Mumbai’s real estate market through both private deals and state-backed redevelopment projects. The Goregaon project is the group’s third such redevelopment in the city, following contracts for a slum project in the Bandra Kurla Complex financial district and the 259-ha Dharavi slum.

 “This project is one of largest cluster redevelopments in the country,” Jaiswal said.

Established in 1977 to provide low-cost affordable housing to residents of the state, MHADA has built about a million homes – two-thirds of those in Mumbai alone. It plans to add another 800,000 more units in the state over the coming years, Jaiswal noted. 

Slums occupy nearly a fourth of Mumbai’s land and house more than half of its population of 21 million, according to a survey by the state Slum Rehabilitation Authority.

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“We have around 12 large cluster projects within Mumbai in the works, which will involve construction of 16 million square metres of housing and rehabilitation of over 75,000 tenements,” Jaiswal explained. BLOOMBERG