7-8 Hectares of Mumbai Port land allocated to redevelopment said Mumbai Port Trust Chairman

Mumbai, 25^th April 2019: “The Mumbai port is shifting towards development of Sea tourism and Sea water transportation” said Mr Sanjay Bhatia, Chairman Mumbai Port Trust at the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and in association with CBRE as knowledge partner organized 8th Regional Conference on CII Infrastructure Project Management themed “Maximizing Real Estate – Getting Future Ready” in Mumbai. The objective to lead industry deliberations to combat challenges facing the Real Estate sector in India.

The Infrastructure Project Management Conference focused on discussing key aspects on how to maximize construction practices to include a data driven and value-based strategy, empowered cross-functional work teams, deployment of technology, among others. It also underlined the approach to maintain India’s position as the top investment destination.

“Mumbai port has reduced the load capacity to 60 million tons of cargo per day and is promoting sea tourism through Cruise development. Last year, 48 ships (international cruises) arrived at the Mumbai Port, this year 150 cruises are coming in and in the next year, around 300 cruises are lined up. In addition to these Domestic cruises have also started all over the country with the first Mumbai Goa Domestic cruise operational in full capacity” – said Mr Bhatia.

Mr. Gurjot Bhatia, Managing Director, Project Management Group, CBRE South Asia Pvt Ltd., said, “The Infrastructure sector in India is a key driver for the economy. The sector enjoys significant focus and support from the government through policies that would lead to world class infrastructure in the country. From constructing airports, to strengthening India’s roads, ports, and railway infrastructure, the focus has been on making India ready to cater to the future. What’s most promising is the country’s commitment towards building its technology infrastructure by establishing world class data centers in India. The DC segment is likely to get another boost from the widening net of e-commerce in India. It’s an exciting time for the Indian infrastructure sector, and effective project management will play a key role in ensuring that this growth momentum is maintained.” Mr Bhatia also added that – Re-development is what the real estate sector is heading towards and is one of the biggest answers to housing and infrastructure development in Mumbai

Re-iterating on the discussion of Re-development being the future Mr Sanjay Bhatia added that “Simultaneous to development of tourism the Mumbai Port trust is moving towards the Re development of the areas into a world class Tourist Hub. 7-8 hectares of land around the port will be open for real estate development with world class restaurants, ports and harbors. A one km Eastern waterfront is under development at Bhauchadhakka which will have all the modern amenities and will have the capacity of handling 300 yachts”.

“We are coming up with 282 hectares land in the Sewri Haji Bandar area, out of which 207 hectares is going to be a huge garden called High Park, and other areas of around 60 hectares, are going to have wide roads like Manhattan City and a lot of modern amenities are going to be developed in those places. There are also plans of theme parks, floating restaurants and activity areas.” Re – development is the key to development of the future.

Being the third largest economy with an ever increasing population, India is working towards the development of millions of new houses, road networks and Smart Cities. India’s real estate sector is to contribute more than 13% to the country’s GDP growth with Institutional investment in the sector at an all-time high at US 5.5 billion in 2018 – said Mrs Kashmira Mewawala, Chairperson, CII Maharashtra State , Head- Business Development and Chief Ethics Councillor, Tata Capital ltd. However, this infrastructural growth suffers some major challenges with the last year seeing 80% of projects being delayed due to manpower shortage, labour issue’s, unclear plans etc. with the increasing need of new infrastructure, there is  a need to achieve new methods to meet the goals and complete the projects.

In the current scenario Corporates are dove tailing their developers towards re-development projects – said Mr Pawan Kant, President long term Assets, Kalpataru Power Transmission Ltd. Today there are over 560 million users of amazon and online shopping from India itself which is the second highest in the world and all of these will be paving the need for Data Centres and Data Hubs.

Data centers will be among us and the faster we imbibe those, faster it will be easy to adjust development accordingly added Mr Kant. “Very soon India is going to have sift towards community data centers and not stand alone data centers. In addition there is also the need for a lot of brown Field development across Maharashtra where several data center will be coming up and will be shaping the new age real estate development.”

“Data is King, is more so today than any time before. With Artificial Intelligence working on data and analyzing and affecting our lives and the incessent growth of social networking which is consuming  a lot of smart data, these is going to be a need of data centres and data warehouses. Every day 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created and 90% of all the data that has ever been created, has been generated in the last two years only” – said Mr Gurjot Bhatia

The conference saw participation from industry experts of reputed realty firms, investors and policy makers through expert talks and specialized panel discussions which circled around three key areas of Data Center – The New Frontier, Re-development – The Challenges and Way Forward and Synergizing Cost Management for Effective Procurement.