In early 1990, Naveen Luthra, then just over 30, and his friend Deepak Mohan, who was the captain of an oil tanker, drove down through the sylvan, thickly forested Sahyadiri ghats towards Mulshi, about 100 km from Lonavala.
It was to be a fateful trip.
“He had made his pot of money and wanted to invest in land in India,” Luthra recalls.
They arrived in Luthra’s Maruti Gypsy at a site where they met some landowners, but the captain found the land valuations very high and soon gave up on the idea of investing.
“Deepak went back to the sea and unfortunately died two years later. However, I quite liked the place and ended up buying 100 acres as an investment with the idea of doing something when I would retire from my Customs clearance business,” said Luthra.
Later, during the monsoon sometime in 1996, Luthra took another trip and was completely mesmerised by Mulshi’s ethereal beauty. He started accumulating more land between 1996 and 2000.
“It’s a little over 1,500 acre now. I initially bought at Rs5,000 an acre but at the end of the entire exercise, my average buying price was about Rs10,000 per acre. While land prices were reasonably cheap then, my buying price would still be termed expensive in those days,” he said.
Luthra wanted to do something related to tourism and planned to develop a one-of-its-kind-in-Asia ‘cave-room’ hotel project at the site.
He had absolutely no idea how to source water for the project — as also for his personal bungalow being built there.
“I realised I will need huge supplies especially for the hotel project and started looking around. I even approached the Tatas to buy water from the Mulshi lake which they have a lease on, but they turned my request down. Digging borewells was very expensive in those days, especially because my requirement was 3 lakh litres per day, and I didn’t know how many borewells would have been needed for that.”
One day, a local familiar with Luthra’s land informed him about a natural spring on the property as the solution to his water problem.
An excited Luthra got two pumps installed and started drawing it out, just to assess the quantity available.
“It was May and we were pumping out over 3-4 lakh litres from the spring and the water level refused to drop any further. We realised there was enough, so we ran a test to see if it was also potable. We got the tests done from 3-4 different places and on the day the report came to my office, I showed it to my friend who was in the business of importing filtration equipment and exporting water treatment plants. On reading the reports, my friend inquired about the source saying the water was of very high quality. Another unique aspect was that the water was pesticide free,” he said.
What Luthra had drilled into was a biological hotspot, or “biologically richest and most endangered ecoregions”.
British environmentalist Norman Myers, who pioneered the concept, said a region must meet two strict criteria to qualify as a hotspot: it must contain at least 0.5% or 1,500 species of vascular plants as endemics, and it has to have lost at least 70% of its primary vegetation.
To put in perspective, India has 2,800 water brands of which only two are free of pesticides — Mulshi, and Aava from Sheelpe Enterprise, a Gujarat-based firm.
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