American,Chinese Real Estate giants to invest in New Town

Kolkata, Sep 15 (UNI) After corporate giants in India like the Tatas and Wipro, it is the turn of American and Chinese companies to invest in the multi-million rupee New Town project in Rajarhat near here.

This was announced today by West Bengal Housing Minister Gautam Deb while addressing members of the Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry(FICCI)Eastern Regional Council on "Emerging Trends in Urbanisation".

Referring to the huge urbanisation going on in New Town areas on 8,000 acres of land for the past few years,Mr Deb said the self-sustainable project had already attracted investment of more than Rs 5,000 crores with large number of Indian corporate giants and multinational companies setting up their units within the area.

He said after the Tatas and IT giant Wipro other companies had decided to pump in hundreds of crores of rupees for building a modern cancer hospital and a global IT centre at Rajarhat. A Detroit based American real estate company the "Bannian Holding Incorporated" had evinced keen interest in developing an exclusive housing complex for the high Income group.

"For this purpose senior representatives of BHI,whose combined wealth was bigger than that of the Indonesian Salim Group, separately met Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacherjee and me yesterday and sought about 30 acres of land for the purpose," Mr Deb said.

Moreover,he said,"a major business conglomerate from China also wanted to invest in New Town in a big way as part of their overall interest in West Bengal. Their representatives would meet me soon to elaborate their business plan and investment proposal," he said without being specific on their size of investment proposals.

Earlier, Chairman and Managing Director of National Housing Bank (NHB) S. Sridhar also referred to his plan for introducing a unique "PURA concept" in the growing urbanisation programme of the country.

Later Mr Sridhar told newsmen that under a pilot project NHB had planned to create housing and other urban facilities in association with some banks and other financial institutions in some cluster villages to arrest the growing trend of largescale migration of villagers to urban areas.

"If the PURA concept under Private-Public-Partnership(PPP) model is successful,it would be implemeted all across the country in thousands of cluster villages even in remote areas," the NHB CMD pointed out.

He said the NHP, as part of its mission towards urbanisation, had planned to disburse Rs 75,000 crores in next three years for building housing complexes for low and middle classes mostly in semi-urban areas.

This was bound to change the face of the country before the rest of the world to whom India is still a land of sadhus and snake charmers, Mr Sridhar claimed.

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