'Lavasa: a beautiful hill city to the south of India’s commercial capital, Mumbai. An answer to overcrowded and congested urban India, with its crumbling infrastructure…’ That, at least, is the theory. Ajit Gulabchand, Chair of the Lavasa Corporation, estimates that India will need 400 new cities in the next 40 years to cope with rapid urbanization. And since the Government cannot cope, the private sector is stepping in with India’s first ‘private city’. In a new twist on poverty eradication, a handful of ‘insignificant’ villages are being razed to the ground to be replaced by a mirage of affluent urban India.
Lavasa is being built along 60 kilometres of lake front, in the pristine Western Ghats – a globally recognized biodiversity hotspot. It has won numerous awards for its ‘new urbanism’ design principles, and has attracted prestigious global partners including Accenture, Deloitte, Microsoft and Oxford University. It envisages a population of about 200,000 with housing – ranging from studio apartments to large villas – meant to be ‘aspirational yet affordable for multiple socio-economic classes’.
