Four cities will appear on the Indian map

MUMBAI/NEW DELHI: On Republic Day this year, Macquarie Bank, Australia’s largest securities firm, announced that it will invest $25 billion along with three partners to create an ultra-modern integrated township on 65,000 acres in Andhra Pradesh, just 170km off Bangalore.

Four weeks later, Tishman Speyer Properties LP, which owns New York’s famous Rockefeller Centre and Frankfurt’s MesseTurm, said it, along with ICICI Bank and Nagarjuna Construction Co, will build a $2 billion residential and commercial township for 30,000 people, spread over 400 acres near Hyderabad.

On Monday, or exactly another four weeks after the Tishman announcement, Al Nakheel LLC, an international property development firm owned by the Dubai government said it will, along with DLF Ltd, build two ‘Manhattans’ near Mumbai and Gurgaon, spread over 20,000 acres each.

Each city will cost about $10 billion or Rs43,300 crore to construct, with the first phase, expected to be completed by 2010, seeing the partners investing $5 billion apiece.

In all, $47 billion or Rs203,000 crore of private money will be invested over the next couple of years to create four ultra modern cities from ground up.

The cities near Mumbai and Gurgaon will be three times as large as New York’s Manhattan Island, DLF said.

All the four cities will be world-class and self-contained, with wide, international-quality roads, telecom networks, educational institutions, industrial clusters, hospitals and amusement parks.