‘Realty is a local play. Going pan-India got many into trouble’

Harshavardhan Neotia (49) carries a burden of legacy. A legacy of 120 years since his forefathers set up ‘Tarachand Ghanshyamdas’, one of the first wholly Indian-owned partnership firms during the British era, a trading firm with offices in Kolkata, Karachi and Shanghai, dabbling in banking, insurance and franchisee of Burma Shell.

The family later diversified into textiles and collieries, sectors that were later nationalised. Then, in the 1980s, a major turning point in the fortune of the Neotia family happened when two brothers: Suresh and Vinod, Harshavardhan’s father, joined hands with Narotam Sekhsaria to set up Gujarat Ambuja Cements Ltd.

The cement company later acquired the sick Modi Cement, and Harshavardhan, the only male heir of the family, was given to manage it, rechristened as Ambuja Cement Eastern Ltd.
With the Neotias and Sekhsaria divesting their cement business to Holcim AG, Harshavardhan now devotes most of his time in the real estate business: setting up large residential projects and malls in West Bengal, easily identifiable due to his eye for details and focus on reserving the heritage through motifs and images.
Ambuja Realty gifted Kolkata the City Centre, a open shopping mall; Udayan, a 25-acre township regarded as a model housing project by Hudco, and also Swissotel, the city’s only hotel within a mall. Harshavardhan was never in a hurry to grow fast, yet he is now moving beyond Bengal, to Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Punjab.
Excerpts of an interview with DNA:

You talk of conservation, respecting heritage, sustainability; words that we don’t normally get to hear from real estate developers when they launch projects. Your projects like the Swabhumi Plaza recreated a 19th century Bengal, while the first City Centre mall as a life size replica of a horse drawn tram carriage that used to ply on the roads of Kolkata in the British era. That’s almost heretic in a cut-throat industry…
Being born and brought up in this wonderful city of Kolkata, you are naturally conditioned by a lot of what is there in the city. I think all of us Calcuttans have - if I may use the word - a little broader sense of life than the more conventional concepts of existence and personal wellbeing. My family has always been closely associated with the worlds of arts and music, and I have been brought up in that milieu. I am a product of that, and as a result things like art, heritage, and aesthetics are important to me. So whatever we do, these creeps in as they are ingrained in my system since my childhood.

Whether its right or wrong I am not judging it. I try to make life rich in texture for everybody who walks into our shopping malls or buys our apartments. My idea is to create environment that generates sparks in people’s life. That’s why we created the City Centre mall that has more open space that shops, or Udayan, our maiden effort, declared as a model housing project by the Union government where residents refuse to move out to swanky apartments elsewhere because of the neighbourhood that they enjoy.

Do your industry peers tell you to stop being so different?
It happened once (laughing). It was this debate over the concept of super built-up area, and there was a huge controversy. At that time, we came up with a whole document within our brochure which explained in a very detailed manner what the super built-up area for our project was. Then a few fellow developers came to me asking why I was being so transparent!

You have largely restricted yourself to West Bengal. Why don’t you move to other metros and states?
We have started moving beyond the state; we have projects in Punjab, Chhattisgarh and Bihar and also Sikkim. A 136-acre township project in Amritsar is coming up and we are eyeing more projects in other cities like Mohali, Khanna, Bathinda and Ludhiana; a City Centre and a 30-acre housing project in Raipur and another City Centre in Patna.

Why haven’t we seen an ambition to be a national player in realty?
As we have seen after the debacle of 2008, real estate is basically a local play. You have to understand the local market and the processes of getting approvals. All those builders who decided to go for a pan-India strategy had huge problems. Sometimes they didn’t understand the market and sometimes they couldn’t understand the regulatory environment. So we have decided we won’t go to many states as we can’t handle that; and administratively, we wanted to know the place and also look at it from a marketing point of view.

Punjab, Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Sikkim. What made you decide on them?
We have gone only to places where we have local knowledge. I used to run a cement plant in Chhattisgarh, I am aware of the local environment as I used to go there 3-4 times a year for 10 years. In Patna, I have a cousin whose family has been staying there for 100 years. He is not a developer but had a parcel of land. Similarly, in Punjab I know a sardarji. While he is a real estate developer, the projects being planned are too big for him to manage so he requested me to partner him.

Your hotel within a mall, the 147-keys Swissotel Kolkata Neotia Vista opened last July. Any other plans to build city hotels?
We had set up the Swissotel and handed it over to them to manage. I have plans to set up three city hotels: some we will manage and some we will give to others to manage. That will be decided on a case-to-case basis.

You also have plans to venture into healthcare sector…
As far as hospitals are concerned, a 250-bed facility in Siliguri is on schedule. Hopefully, it will open in two years’ time. We have completed 4 floors and another two-three need to be done. For the Kolkata project, we have acquired the land, though work has not started. We expect to start by end of this year.