1198153

research-article2023
EPN0010.1177/0308518X231198153EPA: Economy and SpaceBaliga

Original Article A Economy and Space

EPA: Economy and Space

Chasing land, chasing crisis: 2024, Vol. 56(2) 349­–366

© The Author(s) 2023

Interrogating speculative urban Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions
development through DOI: 10.1177/0308518X231198153
https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231198153
journals.sagepub.com/home/epn

developers’ pursuit of land

commodification in Mumbai

Anitra Baliga
Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, UK
IHS, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Abstract
Mumbai, along with a few other metropolitan cities in India, witnessed an unprecedented flow of finance capital
toward the development of new real estate soon after efforts to liberalize the country’s real estate sector
took force in 2005. Fifteen years later, however, the reality on the ground looks bleak. Not only does the
demand for housing remain as high as ever before in Mumbai, but hundreds of real estate projects lie unfinished,
abandoned, and/or unsold. In its attempt to make sense of the city’s real estate crisis, this paper brings to the
fore important insights about the organizing logics of urban land markets. Drawing on an exhaustive database
of real estate indicators combined with ethnographic fieldwork, the paper reveals a tendency among Mumbai
developers to fight competition by chasing land irrespective of long-term financial prudency, which in turn
hinders the development and sale of new real estate. The paper therefore proposes that the reproduction
of capitalistic arrangements within Mumbai’s land market is precarious because the very lands that are to be
turned into commodities inevitably become entangled in new socio-legal encumbrances, just as the separation
of “land from man” begins to seem plausible. By demonstrating how real estate activity is nevertheless, centered
problematically, around this unceasing yet always incomplete pursuit of commodified land, the paper contributes
to the scholarly project of developing a heterodox conceptualization of land.

Keywords
Land market, real-estate crisis, land commodification, speculative urbanism, Mumbai

Introduction: Mumbai’s real estate crisis

Since the mid-1990s, shortly after the advent of pro-market reforms in India, Mumbai’s land market
has been gradually liberalized, opening up new territories for private investment, and prioritizing real
estate profit regardless of its social or productive function. The first of many big changes to make real
estate markets internationally accessible was the legalization of foreign direct investment (FDI) in

Corresponding author:
Anitra Baliga, IHS, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50 Mandeville (T) Building, 14 floor, 3062 PA
Rotterdam.
Email: [email protected]
350 EPA: Economy and Space 56(2)

“urban township construction” in 2002, and further liberalization of the policy in 2005, by the Indian
government. Around the same time, the Securities and Exchange Board of India also began allowing
venture capital funds to invest in real estate, which until then was subject to heavy restrictions, thereby
spurring the emergence of domestic real estate investment funds (Searle, 2016). As a result, Mumbai,
along with a few other metropolitan cities in India, witnessed an unprecedented flow of finance capi-
tal toward the development of new real estate. Private, large-scale production and consumption of real
estate, and housing, in particular, replaced what had otherwise been a state-led project. This shift was
critical in that it not only promised to deliver millions of new housing units for a new post-liberaliza-
tion middle class but also signaled a newfound footing on the global economic stage for India
(Fernandes, 2006).
Construction activities in Mumbai’s island city and northern suburbs soared as the local state
began making certain highly valued lands available for development through a series of industrial
land conversions, slum clearance schemes, and the de-reservation of certain public lands (Adarkar
and Phatak, 2005; D’Monte, 2006). Recognizing an opportunity to build on the new sources of capi-
tal, and eager to produce globally familiar elite landscapes, several enterprising private developers
threw their hats in the ring (Weinstein, 2008). Mumbai’s redevelopment schemes, in particular,
allowed aspiring developers to enter into the city’s increasingly lucrative property markets without
the outright purchase of land. As a result, the number of developers operating in Mumbai grew 457%
in 15 years (Liases Foras, 2018), with many of the early participants having little or even no building
experience. The remarkable rise in developers led to similar growth in the number of projects being
developed (+439%) and the number of housing units planned for production (+519%) over the same
period (Liases Foras, 2018).
While the quantity and scale of residential real estate projects underway in Mumbai mark the
enthusiasm with which finance capital once flowed into the city’s real estate sector, today, many of
these projects have been left unfinished, abandoned, and/or unsold, reflecting a bumpy unfolding of
liberalization efforts. The city has become littered with thousands of such “zombie buildings,” that
are drowning in debt amidst the collapse of Mumbai’s speculative urban development (Ghosh and
Pandya, 2019; Goldman, 2023). In turn, several developers in the city, many of whom emerged as a
consequence of the new sources of finance available to the sector, have filed for bankruptcy, leaving
thousands of small investors and first-time homebuyers stranded (Parkin, 2019). This spate of
unforeseen events, begs closer examination into the logic of neo-liberal urban production, wherein
capital is channeled into locally embedded assets, namely real estate (Weber, 2010), through the
creation of anchoring coalitions by local experts, namely real estate developers (Searle, 2018). For,
what explains the impediments to the marketization of land in Mumbai despite the increased avail-
ability of funding, easing of regulations pertaining to land use/development, and sustained demand
for new real estate?
Recent scholarship on speculative real estate development in India has tried to get at the logics
behind “failed infrastructures” or more broadly, the uneven outcomes and spatial configurations of
speculation and risk. Drawing on Bengaluru, India’s third most populous city, as a case study, Michael
Goldman highlights how modes of urban development are becoming increasingly sensitive to “the
imperatives of the rapid turnover of capital” and geared to “luring and tying down investors, while
also anticipating their imminent departure” (Goldman, 2010: 230). In a more recent paper, Goldman
demonstrates how large private equity firms capture markets of depressed assets of unsold housing
and unfilled office space in India, by leveraging these and similar assets as collateral for investments
elsewhere, establishing further the vulnerability of urban development to the dynamics of global
financial flows (Goldman, 2023: 16).
Furthermore, as, Llerena Searle points out, the routes of accumulation forged to attract foreign
capital into Indian real estate have also proved to be messy and paradoxical, as local intermediaries,
rather than serving simply as conduits for finance capital, generate different kinds of risks and slow
Baliga 351

transactions, thus contributing to further uncertainty, or what she calls, the “contradiction of media-
tion” (Searle, 2018).
The above works, among others (see: Sood, 2017 for a comprehensive overview of speculative
urbanism in the Indian context) are compelling in that they identify the goal of speculative invest-
ment, especially in the Global South, as not just to corner and monopolize, but also to quickly “get
out” with higher-than-average profits. However, the deployment of the “optics of finance” to study
speculative real estate development, has been critiqued for positing too mechanistic a relationship
between global financial flows and the trajectory of urban development (Rouanet and Halbert, 2016).
In particular, Halbert and others have argued that Goldman’s conceptualization of speculative urban-
ism leaves little space for the agency of local nonstate actors and resistance, partly described by
Benjamin’s (2008) occupancy urbanism and Weinstein’s (2014b) durable slum. Besides, even though
real estate is a popular financial investment, it entails a great deal of uncertainty, often requiring
participants looking to get in, to engage in ad hoc tactics (Baliga and Weinstein, 2022) and faith-
based decision-making (Rahman, 2022), which contribute greatly, if not more than the fickleness of
global finance, to the crisis- tendencies of speculative urban development. This paper, therefore,
shifts attention to the responses of local developers to the uncertainty and indeterminacy of real
estate development, by taking their decision to “get in,” as its analytical starting point (Beckert,
2016). In doing so, the paper contributes to a heterodox conceptualization of land, which acknowl-
edges the multiplicity of “impairments” that simultaneously hinder land’s commodification and aug-
ment its perverse effects.
The paper is structured as follows: In Section 2, I deliberate the theoretical productiveness of
acknowledging both land’s ability to serve as a conduit for capital accumulation and a hard to assem-
ble resource for capital “fixing.” Then, I provide a background into Mumbai’s real estate landscape in
Section 3, highlighting how Mumbai’s unyielding development uncertainties and increasingly stricter
conditions for financing, pose as challenges to developers in their strive to fight competition. In want-
ing to study developers’ responses to these challenges, and ultimately understand which concerns are
given more weight over others and how that shapes the land market, I investigate in Section 4, the
domains of competition most important to developers, using secondary data on firm-level real estate
sales and production indicators. I then delve further into developer behavior in Section 5, relying on
a combination of ethnographic research and data on project launches, to demonstrate how developers’
strategies to stay relevant, favors temporally closer concerns linked to land acquisition more so than
longer-term concerns such as debt management. The paper ends with the proposition that the specula-
tive logic followed by local developers, to “get in” no matter what, contrasts the logics of global
finance, which is most concerned with “getting out” quick. Such a disconnect, I argue, frustrates
efforts to commodify land while also contributing to the crisis that ensues from land’s
commodification.

Land as a commodity
In recent times, a wide range of scholarship that recognizes land markets as highly demanding arenas
of social interaction has brought renewed interest to the debates around land’s commodification
(Fraser, 2014; Naybor, 2015; Prudham, 2013, 2015). Scholars such as Li (2014) contend that the
spectrum of action and reflection concerning land cannot be captured if we define land narrowly, as
“ownable property.” For, as Li points out through her study of privatization of property in upland vil-
lages of Sulawesi, Indonesia:

“[land] may be privately owned, but for centuries much effort has been dedicated to preventing its
privatization by surrounding it with customary injunctions, suppressing land markets, setting aside
protected areas, and so on.”
352 EPA: Economy and Space 56(2)

But while land’s diverse affordances make it especially challenging to assemble as a resource avail-
able for global investment, this work is nevertheless accomplished, albeit incompletely and often with
struggle, as demonstrated by Levien (2018) in his study of land grab in rural India. It is for this reason
that Christophers (2016: 137) and others argue for land’s treatment as a real commodity, both theoreti-
cally and empirically, because as he notes,

“for all the frustration of capital that can occur, the fact remains that land is successfully commoditized –
relentlessly and increasingly universally – and it does widely serve as a successful conduit of capital
accumulation.”

At the root of this debate lies not whether fictitious commodities like land, labor, and money can be
disembedded from their socio-cultural contexts and treated as real commodities, as famously ques-
tioned by Karl Polanyi, but rather the theoretical usefulness of analyzing land through the Polanyian
lens, which seeks to dismantle the market-state binary (Peck, 2013; Prudham, 2013). Therefore,
where Block and Somers (2014) have argued that both disembedding and commodifying fictitious
commodities are ideological projects engaged in by market liberals, others have criticized this inter-
pretation for not providing a sufficiently robust framework to capture the multiplicity of perverse
consequences that unfold when market forces are unleashed; “setting off chains of real consequences
that must be taken seriously” (Polanyi and Kari, 2018). Usefully, the need to acknowledge both con-
cerns has triggered efforts to develop a comparative, heterodox framing of commodification, which,
Fred Block notes, involves capturing the dynamics of impairment that neo-Polanyian scholars are
concerned with, without engaging in the reification of markets as natural entities separate from the
state (Block, 2022).
A small but growing body of literature has contributed to the dialectical project of conceptualizing
land’s commodification as necessarily incomplete, involving a double play of association and disas-
sociation of land from its contextual setting (Fairbairn, 2013; Gagné, 2021; Martin, 2019). These
works are significant in that they delve into the pluralistic logics and outcomes of “separating land
from man. . . to satisfy the requirements of the real estate market” (Polanyi, 2001: 187). A related
strand of work that has tended to dominate the discourse on land markets in India, has relied on the
frame of “speculative urbanism” to get at the logics behind the turbulent trajectory of land develop-
ment in the neoliberal era (Goldman, 2010, 2011, 2023; Halbert and Rouanet, 2014; Searle, 2016,
2018). By demonstrating how attempts to transform fixed, illiquid parcels of land into financial assets
open to global capital have paradoxically contributed to illiquidity in India’s real estate sector (ulti-
mately requiring further intervention by the state), these works have contributed to the nuanced
understanding of land’s commodification as an incomplete, dualistic, and fraught process.
While the frame of speculative urbanism has proved useful to delineate how the whims of
finance capital (re)produce an unstable development environment leading to land market dysfunc-
tion and crisis, it has largely relied on a “follow the money approach” to uncover the chains of
transnational investment that contribute to land’s commodification and decommodification (Halbert
and Rouanet, 2014: 475). In particular, the approach has sought to unravel the vulnerability of
urban development to the strategies of global financial flows, namely private equity’s ultimate
concern of “getting out” (Goldman, 2023) despite the contradictions of mediation and financial
capital switching (Searle, 2018). However, as a consequence, the approach seemingly posits a
mechanistic, if not orthodox, relationship between global financial flows and the trajectory of urban
development, pinning its focus on the “relentless dynamism and hyper-mobility of finance capital”
(Goldman and Narayan, 2021), while flattening other fundamental concerns like land being a
“strange object” (Li, 2014), the agency of local development actors (Brill, 2022), the uncertainty
surrounding future values of land (Weber, 2021), and faith-based decision making in response to
such uncertainties (Rahman, 2022).
Baliga 353

This paper, therefore, contributes to the theoretical project of developing a conceptualization of

land that is sympathetic to both—it’s more often than not function to serve as a conduit of capital
accumulation, and the perverse consequences that ensue from land’s treatment as a commodity. It
does so by focusing on the responses of local developers to the indeterminacies of land’s commodifi-
cation. The analysis reveals that a wide range of socio-cultural-economic expectations underpin
developers’ pursuit of commodified land (beyond global finance’s relentless quest for higher returns),
including and most significantly, the visibility and distinction that successful land acquisition brings
to competing developers. The paper argues that for developers operating in a context where tempo-
rally closer concerns linked to land acquisition dominate longer-term concerns such as debt manage-
ment, speculative urban development becomes all about “getting in,” in stark contrast to the logic of
global finance, which is most concerned with “getting out.” In highlighting this disconnect between
the goals of developers and financiers, which contributes to the multiplicity of “impairments” that
simultaneously hinder and produce perverse effects to land’s marketization, the paper seeks to pro-
ductively build on land’s heterodox theorization, using Mumbai as a case study.

Cracking the messy business of land development in Mumbai

Mumbai’s unique topography and high population density have contributed to a scarcity of land, to
such extent that uninhabited, developable land is almost non-existent in the city today. Informal set-
tlements, or “slums,” as they have come to be officially recognized, occupy 36.45 km2, or 48.6% of
the total developable land area in Mumbai, and are scattered across the entire landscape of the city,
including the south and west regions where real estate is most expensive (Bhagat and Yadav, 2017;
Das et al., 2018). Over the last two decades, state authorities have responded to the shortage of devel-
opable land by incentivizing redevelopment, under the pretext of ameliorating the city’s housing cri-
sis. These measures most notably involved the scrapping of protective policies such as the Urban
Land Ceiling and Regulation Act, which restricted hoarding of land by single persons or entities,
diluting laws governing the redevelopment of industrial lands, and the demolition of slum settle-
ments. Efforts to increase land-use efficiency, and make urban land “economically productive,” meant
that urban residential redevelopment, and the redevelopment of slums, in particular, became the pri-
mary development model for real estate production in Mumbai (Bertaud, 2004). By 2014, redevelop-
ment projects accounted for over 80% of all proposed real estate activity in Mumbai, making the
social and technical work of re-purposing land a defining feature of the city’s land market (Bombay
High Court, 2016).
As a protection against developers coercing residents to participate in redevelopment work, the
Slum Redevelopment Authority, and the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority, the
two official agencies through which redevelopment work is administered, require that 70% of residents
consent to a proposed project before approval is granted. Acquiring consent is, however, a drawn-out
process involving tedious negotiations between developers and residents (Baliga and Weinstein, 2022).
Since residents have varying concerns regarding compensations and do not constitute a homogenous
group of actors, disagreements among them, including over which developer to support, are both com-
mon and inevitable (Patel and Arputham, 2007). The struggle over consent acquisition is furthermore,
exacerbated by the fundamental problem of unclear titles and ambiguous property rights. Residents and
developers must therefore navigate opaque rules of land ownership and exchange, for consent to be
acquired (Weinstein, 2014a). Besides, with the redevelopment scheme requiring residents to hand over
their land to a developer for a loosely specified period of time while redevelopment takes place, the
impact of non-cooperation and development uncertainties is far more significant for residents than for
developers, as a consequence of which, developers have found it difficult to get residents to vacate their
homes, even when a majority of them consented to a redevelopment project.
354 EPA: Economy and Space 56(2)

Ethnographic accounts of redevelopment efforts at Dhobi Ghat (Baliga and Weinstein, 2022),
Dharavi (Weinstein, 2014b), Golibar (McQuarrie et al., 2013), and Santacruz (Arputham and Patel,
2010)—sites that have taken several years to develop, and/or remain hindered by conflicts—reveal
just how tedious and unpredictable redevelopment work can be, even for the most experienced devel-
oper. These case studies show how urban institutions combine with the space of the slum to produce
a distinctively urban subjectivity, that reflects a faith in liberal institutions such as equality before the
law, even when the state is a key actor in appropriating land for private construction (Dupont, 2011;
Ghertner, 2011; Shatkin, 2016; Weinstein, 2014b). When examined as a field of struggle, these sites
reveal a more expansive political possibility that can sustain an inclusive and tolerant urban imagi-
nary, in direct contrast with the way struggles over urban land are usually presented (Blomley, 2004;
Doshi and Ranganathan, 2017; Ghertner, 2014; Sassen, 2013; Shatkin, 2014). The challenges of rede-
velopment moreover, demonstrate how political entrepreneurship, while necessary, is not sufficient to
facilitate development work amid institutional fragmentations and political contestations. Instead,
land exchange is often pinned on ad hoc, short-sighted strategies geared toward solving highly con-
text-specific problems (Baliga, 2020).
Yet, not long after the Indian real estate sector was opened to new sources of finance, real estate
development in Mumbai witnessed an unprecedented shift, with many PE funds lining up to invest in
risky slum redevelopment ventures. Omkar Realtors and Developers Pvt. Ltd, was one of the first
developers in India to secure PE funding for slum redevelopment work (Nandy, 2011). In 2011, Red
Fort Capital Advisors Pvt. Ltd, a real estate focussed investment fund, invested ₹ 250 crores (US$30
million) in a slum redevelopment project led by Omkar. That same year, Omkar raised a second round
of PE funding, of ₹ 200 crores (US$25 million), from Indiareit Fund Advisors Pvt. Ltd, making
Omkar the most successful developer to reign in PE funding for slum redevelopment work. In keeping
with the trend, IIFL Alternate Asset Advisors Ltd, made their first investment from their first private
equity (PE) fund, into a central Mumbai slum redevelopment project developed by Sheth Creators,
and ASK Property Investment Advisors Pvt. Ltd invested ₹ 100 crores (US$12.5 million) in Godrej
Properties Ltd’s first redevelopment project in Mumbai. These deals marked not only many “firsts”
but also signaled the enthusiasm with which global capital sought to capture the high rent gap that
Mumbai’s slums promised. For, slums, as Kaustuv Roy, executive director of property advisory firm
Cushman and Wakefield put it, “occupy some of the most expensive locations in the city [with] very
high potential for price appreciation,” and the likes of Omkar, as Forbes reported, had “cracked the
messy business of slum redevelopment in Mumbai” (Nandy, 2012; Srivastava, 2012).
These new modes of financing spurred remarkable growth among developers who could success-
fully acquire inhabited lands for redevelopment. However, since the uncertainties of redevelopment
remained unaddressed, financing arrangements were subject to continual re-work, keeping in mind
the risks for and interests of lending institutions. Equity-based partnerships were quickly replaced by
mezzanine debt- a hybrid between debt and equity, which gives a lender the right to convert to an
equity interest in the development firm or project, in case of default, where the broad definition of
default covers deviation from scheduled timelines. Developers could, under these new conditions, be
replaced out of a project, should they fail to deliver timely and sizable gains from land’s development,
that is, the very expectation that wins them access to funding in the first place. In other words, as
regimes of financing became stronger and stricter in response to Mumbai’s unyielding development
uncertainties, developers found themselves aggressively chasing the promise of commodified land,
while being chased by the inevitable crisis that comes with the failure to deliver on that promise. It is
within these contradictory realities that developers in Mumbai compete to crack the messy business
of land development, struggling to turn land into tradeable global assets via financing routes that risk
their long term survival in the market for land.
Baliga 355

Developer distinction in the pursuit of land

When I began fieldwork for this project in February 2017, I was intrigued by the world of real estate
developers- a group that had experienced rapid expansion following the influx of foreign funding a
decade earlier. I embarked on a 15-month-long ethnographic study, involving a total of 87 semi-
structured interviews and numerous informal conversations with individuals directly or indirectly
engaged in real estate development in Mumbai. Through these interviews, I discovered that I was not
alone in attempting to comprehend the field of developers. Various other actors, including financiers,
consultants, and developers themselves, were striving to distinguish and categorize developers within
a relatively new context. I noticed my interview participants employed terms such as “revolutionary,”
“bankable,” and “fly-by-night” when talking about different types of developers. These terms, to me,
denoted not just developer distinctions, but also developer strategies, which eventually became a
focal point for my research.
During the many real estate conferences I attended as part of my fieldwork, I also found that land
market actors in Mumbai talked extensively about transaction costs relating to land acquisition and
government approvals, more so than the uncertainty pertaining to demand-supply dynamics. I saw
this as their way to signal which developer characteristics or competences are more relevant for suc-
cess over others. Without any immediate or easy solutions in sight for project delays, financiers espe-
cially, referred to the capability of developers to get things done against all odds, as a way to cope
with, and make decisions in spite of, developmental uncertainties.

“If a developer is effective in overcoming hurdles, whatever they may be. . . having the right political
connections. . . the foresight to prevent roadblocks basically, I will put my money on him,” claimed
Vasudev Krishnan, chairman of a non-banking finance company, when asked about the conundrum of
financing risky real estate projects (interviewed, September 2018).

Interviews with several other finance professionals led me to think that the perceived ability of a
developer to acquire land without incurring unexpected delays was the key to accessing the new
sources of finance capital waiting to be deployed for real estate development in Mumbai.
Of course, for a more definitive claim, a controlled experiment would need to be carried out, to
assess how financiers make decisions when lending toward real estate development, and the degree to
which they favor developer reputation over asset value securing the deal, and the project’s projected
financial revenues. However, this was not quite the intent of this research. Rather, I was interested in
studying developers’ quest to be noticed and become distinguished among a sea of competing devel-
opers, and more specifically the strategies they adopted to get there.
To delve deeper into the nature of competition among developers, and more specifically their dis-
tinction strategies, I examined the primary domains of competition that are of significance to develop-
ers in Mumbai, and thereby the uncertainties that are given more weight over others when making
decisions about land’s development. Carrying out such an investigation, however meant relying more
on quantitative data on real estate sales and production indicators, as opposed to the initial ethno-
graphic work that led me to this investigation, and which informs the broader project that this paper
is a part of. The rest of this section therefore focuses on what aspect of land’s marketization is most
relevant for developers looking to “get in,” and whether or not this bounds their ability to successfully
develop land, and ultimately create a stable environment for land’s marketization.

Mapping developer distinctions

Methodology. In order to examine how, and to what extent, real estate developers distinguish them-
selves from each other to beat competition, I measure standard deviations across three primary
domains of competition that influence developers’ organizational life chances. These are competition
356 EPA: Economy and Space 56(2)

for customers, financing, and land, which are directly or indirectly reflected in the real estate units of
launch price, sales velocity, and ongoing projects. Launch price is the publicly advertised price of a
property when a developer launches a new project. While this may not be the actual price at which the
property is transacted, launch prices are a good indicator of how developers view themselves in rela-
tion to other developers (and consumers) when pricing their products. Sales Velocity, on the other
hand, is a measure of how quickly developers are able to sell off their stock (of apartments). Sales
velocity is, therefore, an indicator of how consumers differentiate between developers when buying
property on the one hand, and the holding capacity, or crudely put, the financial power of a developer,
on the other. Finally, ongoing projects is the number of projects a developer has ongoing at any point,
which is a rough measure of the scale of operations of a developer, as well as their resourcefulness in
sourcing land.
For measuring standard deviation across price, sales velocity, and ongoing projects among a group
of developers, other variables, such as time and location, must be kept constant. Since it is impossible
to study projects or developer activity in a single location, the closest alternative is to identify a loca-
tional cluster with (1) a fairly high representation of developer types and (2) a fairly low price-differ-
entiation across properties (per unit area) within the cluster. I identified two such locational clusters,
one in East Mumbai, comprising the adjoining neighborhoods of Ghatkopar and Vikhroli, and one in
North Mumbai, in the neighborhood of Kandivali, where several new residential buildings have come
up in the past decade (Figure 1). Since the price and sales velocity of real estate does not change sig-
nificantly in a 1-year period, data is collated in yearly cycles. However, to avoid bias toward a particu-
lar phase in the evolution of Mumbai’s real estate market, I examine deviances in five different years
(2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017). Data for this study was procured from Liases Foras (LF) India—a
private real estate data agency based in Mumbai; hence minor errors in LF’s dataset are reproduced in
this research as well. Most noteworthy of these errors are: delay in noting of launch price,1 and mis-
reporting of sales velocity in the first few quarters.2 To mitigate these errors, I only considered fourth-
quarter data in case of launch price, and the average performance of the first four quarters in case of
sales velocity.
Other discrepancies in the methodology include, as mentioned above, the attribution of the price
difference to developer reputation as opposed to locational features; ignoring project size/scale in the
calculation of sales velocity3; as well as ignoring the size of each project in the counting of a devel-
oper’s ongoing projects. While the discrepancy related to price difference has been left unaddressed
(since the selection of neighborhood clusters already attempts to minimize locational price variation),
data on sales velocity has been normalized to account for the vastly different sizes in projects.
Discrepancies in project count on the other hand, while possible to correct, is not essential, since the
intention of this exercise is not to measure the absolute size of a developer’s land bank, but rather their
resourcefulness in acquiring new lands. As a result, standard deviations, in reality, would be lower
than the findings presented below in case of price, and to some extent sales velocity (since projects
located in better areas would also sell faster, irrespective of developer reputation), and higher in case
of project count (as larger land parcels are more difficult to acquire).

Findings
My analysis reveals that launch price across all 5 years has the lowest coefficient of variation (average
of 0.21) as compared to sales velocity and project count (Figure 2). Put differently, quoted price of
built property (per unit area) seems to be the least distinguishing factor among developers in Mumbai.
There also appears to be little consistency in which type of developer commands a higher or lower
price for their product. This is because many other factors such as project location, its scale, the hold-
ing capacity of a developer, and product features (amenities, material specifications, etc.) determine
the price of real estate.
Baliga 357

Figure 1. Locations analyzed for standard deviation across price, sales, and projects (Compiled by Author;
Map: Kepler.gl).

The coefficients of variation of sales velocity across the 5 years are higher (average of 0.66) than
launch price but lower than project count. Again, there is no consistency in the pace of sales of differ-
ent developers, that is, reputed developers do not necessarily sell their stock faster than lesser-known
developers. On the contrary, developers of low repute clocked in the highest sales velocity in most
years. According to real estate analysts, this is because small developers tend to focus on the small-
scale redevelopment of old residential building clusters, wherein (the few) additionally built flats are
sold to family members or friends of existing residents. Hence many redevelopment projects of this
type are sold out almost instantly after being launched.
358 EPA: Economy and Space 56(2)

Figure 2. Comparison of the builder groups’ coefficients of variations (Compiled by Author; Data: Liases
Foras, 2019 ).

The highest coefficient of variation among the three factors is of ongoing project count (average of
5 years = 0.83). Therefore, the most distinguishing feature of a Mumbai developer is the number of
projects they have ongoing at any point. However, it is worth noting that there is no correlation
between project count and launch price or sales velocity. In other words, having a high number of
ongoing projects does not give developers any advantage in speed of sales or product pricing. This is
because, when developers venture outside their neighborhood of dominance, which is inevitable
when expanding project count, they lose their network advantages. Yet, as these findings confirm,
developers in Mumbai are most inclined to distinguish themselves by increasing their project count.

Mapping developer growth

To further investigate the nature of competition that distinguishes between developers with an une-
qual number of ongoing projects, I look at the past project records of the same developers whose
performance I analyzed above. The intention is to determine whether the deviance in developers’
ongoing project count relates to their different points of entry into the market, or rather a difference in
each developer’s ambition/ ability to scale up. I, therefore, examine the pace of growth of each devel-
oper, in terms of project count, by ignoring the staggered starts of their operations. Since the idea is to
test how quickly developers increase their project count, I filtered out developers with less than five
projects. Doing so reduced the sample size to a total of 16 developers, from the original pool of 64
developers. Among the selected 16 developers, the lowest project count to date is that of Shivam
Parivar Developers (year 0: 4 projects; year 1: 7 projects), and the highest project count is of Lodha
Developers (year 0: 1 project; year 15: 61 projects).

Findings
My findings reveal, firstly, that all developers follow a linear growth progression (Pearson coefficient
for the linear correlations is 0.97 ± 0.03, Figure 3). This means that developers continue to launch
new projects at a steady pace as time progresses—irrespective of their firm size or changes in market
conditions. In other words, there is no observation of exponential growth or sudden decline in any
developer’s project count. Secondly, all developers, except two (from a total of 16), have a very simi-
lar growth gradient. The mean gradient among the majority of developers is 1.62 launches per year
(with a standard deviation of 0.32). This means that most developers with a project count greater than
5, follow each other in their pace of new launches, to launch 1–2 new projects every year, even though
Baliga 359

Figure 3. Project growth rate of 16 developers shows a linear growth of about 1.62 launches per year
(Compiled by Author; Data: Liases Foras, 2019).

Table 1. Mean gradient (project launches per year) and the standard deviation of 15 developers.

Mean gradient Standard deviation Mean Pearson correlation (R2)

ALL 1.98 1.02 0.97
ALL but Lodha and Neumec 1.61 0.32 0.97
Lodha and Neumec 4.55 0.05 0.97

land acquisition and approvals have no standard timelines. The two exceptions to this trend are Lodha
and Neumec, with gradients of 4.5 and 4.6, respectively (Table 1).
To summarize, an examination of variance across three primary domains of competition reveals
that developers in Mumbai distinguish themselves, least of all, through the pricing of their products.
While the difference in speed of sales is more noteworthy, it is the number of projects in a developer’s
portfolio (ongoing or completed) that mostly sets developers apart from each other. Furthermore,
among the developers that stand out because of their high project count, there is an observable pattern
and similarity in the pace of portfolio expansion, barring a few exceptions. Developers, therefore,
seem to follow each other to launch a certain number of projects every year, even though doing so has
no positive impact on their performance in other domains of competition.

Resource administration over real estate production

A linear growth pattern, achieved through steady expansion of project portfolio is peculiar for Mumbai
developers, especially those engaging in redevelopment work, which, cannot be carried out through
standardized practices within pre-determined timelines. More importantly, a linear pace of growth is
hard to sustain given the strict restrictions on land financing in India. As per guidelines set by India’s
central banking regulator, the Reserve Bank of India, private developers cannot avail, in part or full,
bank finance for the purchase of land for real estate development. The unavailability of bank finance
360 EPA: Economy and Space 56(2)

for land acquisition means that developers must either wait until they are flushed with cash at the end
of a project’s sales or take on a high-interest loan from shadow banks, to be able to purchase land for
a new project. However, both options are unviable, as, on the one hand, developers’ revenues are
neither consistent nor quick to come through, as is evident from the high unsold inventory recorded
by the city every year since 2017 (Urs, 2020). On the other hand, since project uncertainties are high-
est at the land acquisition stage, lenders of all sorts are averse to extending loans to developers until
all acquisition and permit-related uncertainties are out of the way. Under such conditions, developers
must look for alternate means of resource management to keep up with the competitive pace of port-
folio expansion.
One such alternate, and not-so-legal means of acquiring new lands for development, I was made
aware by my participants, was through the diversion of funds, from one project to another. Financiers
I talked to, claimed that funds diversion is the most significant risk when lending to a developer, or
investing in real estate development in India. And that, even though the rules of financing have gotten
tighter over the years to ensure that cash outflow and income from a project remains dedicated to the
project, developers nevertheless find ways to overcome these restrictions, partly because of financi-
ers’ own laxity. Since developers normally rely on a combination of financing sources for a single
project, and since most real estate financing is debt-based, financiers tend to be less vigilant about the
flow of funds, so long as a developer is not defaulting on repayments.
Developers acknowledge, off the record, that the practice of funds diversion is not uncommon,
especially during real estate booms, when financiers have their guards down. Developers may, there-
fore, at such times, divert revenue earned from one project through customer advances, toward the
purchase of new land parcels for future development, instead of using that money for project comple-
tion. Since financing provided by customers comes at zero cost, any increase in the value of a newly
purchased land is pure profit for the developer. In seeking to restrict such malpractices, the Indian
Parliament, in March 2016, established a Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) in each state for
regulation of the sector. As per the newly introduced RERA regulations, 70% of all revenue collection
of a project must now be protected in an escrow account managed by a third-party bank or recognized
lender. Developers are, however, able to bypass the restricted access to customer payments by delay-
ing the official registration of the property sale and collecting a large amount of pre-payment in the
form of cash. According to real estate agents, a developer may typically collect up to 25% of the sale
price from customers within the first 3 months of booking, while registration of the sale may only take
place after all approvals have been received, which could be as much later as 4 years, or more.
Conversely, when real estate sales are slow, and developers have access to thinner streams of
income, the goal shifts from portfolio expansion to debt management. Developers strive to service
their debt obligations, at such times, by typically replacing expensive debt with less expensive debt,
such as customer advances, or bank borrowing. However, since developers usually have multiple
ongoing projects at any time—all at varying levels of economic productivity—this practice also
entails the diversion of funds from one project to another to ensure that their overall earnings or
EBIDTA (Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation, and Amortisation) stays healthy. While finan-
cial firms receiving the repayments should ideally flag this practice, financiers acknowledge that they
rarely carry out due diligence to ascertain whether the sources of repayments are fresh sales, further
borrowing, or diverted funds from another project. This practice of debt management by moving
project resources around—though illegal—is “all too common among Indian developers” according
to Pankaj, ex-chairman of a housing and development finance company. The logic behind the practice
is, however, peculiar, he notes. Adding that, “most businesses operate on reverse logic. That is, when
the firm is cash-rich, they pare debt. Developers, on the other hand, behave abnormally by leveraging
themselves further in good times and settling their debt when most pressed for cash” (interviewed
November 2017). Pankaj further notes that Indian developers behave this way because they have been
Baliga 361

traditionally deprived of funding, and hence their actions reflect what he calls a “scarcity mentality,”
which compels them to prioritize resource administration over real estate production.
While there is no way for researchers like me to prove financial discrepancies, I found the case of
Omkar developers, a firm whose promoters Babulal Varma and Kamal Kishore Gupta have been
charged by India’s Enforcement Directorate “for cheating and diversion” of a ₹ 410 crore (US$50
million) loan taken from India’s Yes Bank, useful to illustrate the plausibility of Pankaj’s assertion
(Yadav, 2021). A study of Omkar’s development activity shows that the firm’s production followed a
steady growth, even when its sales did not keep pace, or were relatively tumultuous (see: Appendix
A). Furthermore, from 2015 on, Omkar had at least 10 projects—on-going or available for sale—in
parallel, all at varying levels of economic productivity, ranging from 12.3% to 0.25% (calculated as a
ratio of sales velocity and total available supply). Therefore, where slow sales contributed to Omkar’s
resource scarcity, their multiple project count made possible, or rather rationalized, from Omkar’s
perspective, the administration of incoming resources, through its redistribution among the many
projects. In following such a logic, Omkar could have utilized funds reserved for the completion of an
ongoing project, for the acquisition of future ones. Omkar’s case, therefore, illustrates that while new
sources of formal finance made it possible for developers to increase their pace of production and land
acquisition to match that of their competitors, it paradoxically opened new doors for developers to
adopt practices outside of contractual expectations, to service the increased pace and scale of
operations.

Fluctuating fortunes of real estate developers

Market actors in Mumbai recognize that turning land into salable real estate takes work, and this rec-
ognition has come to define the nature of competition and distinction strategies among developers.
With no easy resolution to the hurdles of land development, developers with a demonstrable track
record of project launches understandably stand out, if not appear bankable, amidst a sea of relatively
new players.
For firms like Omkar that began their real estate careers with small residential redevelopments in
the outskirts of Mumbai, the initial success with land acquisitions, and the funding opportunities that
came with it, allowed them to quickly graduate to carrying out multiple, very large-scale develop-
ments in the most expensive neighborhoods. However, in the process, not only did these developers
take on large amounts of debt under precarious conditions, but they also eschewed uncertainties of the
future, like demand-supply mismatch, spurring them to deviate from contractual-legal obligations,
ultimately risking their own long-term survival.
Though stricter rules of borrowing and newly introduced governmental regulations around funds
management aim to curtail malpractices and instill financial discipline among developers, these rules
are, in reality, difficult to enforce, and not always in the best interest of financiers. Rather than disci-
plining developers into being earnest debtors (Kallin, 2021), finance’s dominance over real estate
activity, has exacerbated opportunistic behavior, because of developers overstretched, almost unreal-
izable debt obligations on the one hand, and the wider pool of projects developers have been able to
create to move resources among, on the other. Nonetheless, the consequences of unserviceable debt
and financial fraud has begun to catch up, triggering the downfall of several prominent developers,
including, Omkar (Yadav, 2021). In the 2 years between 2017 and 2019, real estate topped the bank-
ruptcy chart in India, with over 235 companies, mostly from Mumbai and Delhi, admitted for resolu-
tion under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (John, 2019). Several developers, who had emerged
as a consequence of liberalization of the real estate sector, and were recipients of much of the new
sources of financing available for real estate development over the past decade, have had to shut
operations abruptly, leaving thousands of small investors and homebuyers stranded.
362 EPA: Economy and Space 56(2)

This spate of sudden liquidations, marks a new kind of fragility that has come to underpin Mumbai’s
land market: the fluctuating fortunes of real estate developers. With the organizational life chances of
developers wildly uncertain, investors and consumers of real estate alike, are faced with the indeter-
minacy of decisions to plan for the future. Such indeterminacy undermines the preconditions for
market exchange, wherein, at the very least, the reproduction of capitalistic arrangements and contin-
ued participation of market actors is assured. A collapse of expectations regarding future opportunities
and foreshortening of future perspectives, is already evident from the dwindling foreign investments
into real estate development in India (RBI, 2019). Therefore, while developers may or may not bounce
back from bankruptcy, their unpredictable life expectancy, has indeed set-off a recurring crisis that
poses obstruction to the marketization of land’s development, despite the sustained demand for hous-
ing in Mumbai.

Conclusion: Lessons from a crisis

The crisis of destabilized money supply and fluctuating fortunes of real estate developers offers
important insights into Mumbai’s land market, particularly, the eternal pursuit of commodified land,
and the contingencies that this chase brings with it. One of the key findings presented in this paper is
that land market decisions are often guided not by expectations of future land-price behavior or
increased production and sale of new real estate, but by temporally closer concerns related to the
complications of land’s private acquisition and thereby, commodification. As a result, the timely com-
pletion and eventual sale of real estate projects through competitive pricing, end up becoming less
important as compared to a developer’s ability to simply acquire new projects, at a steady albeit
unsustainable pace. Such a tendency, toward the continual launch, if not actual production, or even
deliberation of new projects, reveals the organizing power that the allure of commodified land has
within land markets.
In a city like Mumbai, where much developable land is contested, it is no surprise that the imagina-
tion of commodified land dominates the minds of developers, investors, and home buyers alike, espe-
cially after the recent relaxation of land-use restrictions and financing regulations. The perceived
success in acquiring new lands for development, in turn, serves as the means for developers to dif-
ferentiate and distance themselves from competitors and assign themselves greater value, or distinc-
tion, in the process. This distinction tactic, I note, can be understood as a competition in which the
styles of a “bankable developer” are in continual development, and those who do not follow this trend
soon become stale, and irrelevant to their market peers. However, with ever more developers in
Mumbai claiming to be good at overcoming uncertainties that accompany land’s privatized develop-
ment, the strive for distinction has unfortunately meant hasty land acquisitions and project launches,
supported by costly, if not precarious, financial arrangements. For local developers, therefore, specu-
lative urban development is all about “getting in,” in stark contrast to the logic of global finance,
which is most concerned with “getting out.”
Recognition of this disconnect in the speculative logics of global finance and local real estate pro-
duction is useful not just for making sense of the thousands of unfinished and abandoned “Zombie”
projects, but also to capture the variegated impairments that underpin land’s commodification. By
examining why developers struggle to follow through on the execution and sale of launched projects
despite the sustained interest and demand for real estate in the city, the paper unravels an important
paradox. The very lands that are to be turned into commodities inevitably become entangled in new
socio-legal encumbrances, just as the separation of “land from man” begins to seem plausible. The
pursuit of commodified land cannot but be held back by the uncertainties that the promise of com-
modified land seeks to overcome. This self-compromising tendency of land markets points to impedi-
ments that are, despite the distress caused to homebuyers, linked to reasons intrinsic to the market’s
Baliga 363

organization, rather than an external, societal push back to land’s commodification, as is commonly
expected and documented by orthodox scholars of the double movement.
Notwithstanding the impediments that keep Mumbai’s land markets in a perineal state of crisis,
land’s development, or rather the promise to produce globally familiar elite landscapes, and the pos-
sibility to accrue profits from this promise, nevertheless lives on, unceasingly. Learnings from
Mumbai’s real estate crisis are therefore useful for unraveling land’s duality, to serve both as a conduit
for capital accumulation, and as a strange object that is challenging to assemble as a resource for
global investment. In Mumbai, this duality plays out in peculiar ways. Developers turn to strategies
that undermine their ability to create a stable development environment in order to stay relevant in a
development context where the acquisition of land is a challenge in itself. And yet, with every incre-
mental, and ever-so-often successful stride toward land’s assembly as a resource for accruing profits,
the imagination of land as a commodity is reinforced, encouraging developers and allied market
actors to continue to participate in and uphold land’s marketization. Such a dialectical understanding
of the land market’s organization is significant for advancing land’s heterodox theorization, without
getting caught in the theoretical frustrations of its analytical classification as a fictitious or real
commodity.

Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Gavin Shatkin, Tim Bartley, Liza Weinstein, Leon Wansleben, Suzi Hall, and
members of the REFCOM group at KU Leuven for their thoughtful feedback and insightful comments on earlier
drafts of this work. Additionally, sincere thanks to the three anonymous reviewers whose rigorous assessments
and constructive critiques significantly enhanced the quality of this paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1. Liases Foras, An Indian Data Agency, collects data on property prices primarily through a method they call
“mystery shopping,” which entails physically visiting the project or telephoning the sales team, by posing as
customers. This exercise is repeated every quarter for all projects under review. New projects however are
often late (by a quarter or two) in entering the review system, especially when there isn’t much advertising
about its launch, or if the project is in a distant location from other projects being monitored.
2. Sales data is collected through the same method as above, wherein surveyors posed as customers enquire
about the availability of flats in every project. The limitation of such a method however is that there is
no way of verifying if representatives of the developer are providing false information about their unsold
inventory (as a marketing ploy). Surveyors claim that the data becomes clearer with every subsequent visit
to the project site, and by the end of the fourth quarter the sales trend is much clearer.
3. Larger projects have a slower sales velocity compared to small projects, because customers of small devel-
opments are generally known to the developer (friends, family, acquaintances) and hence the time taken to
search for customers is much shorter.

References
Adarkar N and Phatak V (2005) Recycling mill land: Tumultuous experience of Mumbai. Economic and Political
Weekly 40(51): 5365–5368.
Arputham J and Patel S (2010) Recent developments in plans for Dharavi and for the airport slums in Mumbai.
Environment and Urbanization 22(2): 501–504.
364 EPA: Economy and Space 56(2)

Baliga A (2020) The construction of Mumbai’s land market. PhD Thesis, London School of Economics, London.
Available at: http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/4238/ (accessed 21 September 2023).
Baliga A and Weinstein L (2022) Grounding urban production: Resident claims-making as financialization in
Mumbai’s ‘slum’ lands. Economy and Society 51: 283–306.
Beckert J (2016) Fictional expectations and the crisis of contemporary capitalism. Economic Sociology: The
European Electronic Newsletter 17(2): 39–45.
Benjamin S (2008) Occupancy urbanism: Radicalizing politics and economy beyond policy and programs.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(3): 719–729.
Bertaud A (2004) Mumbai FSI conundrum. The perfect storm: the four factors restricting the construction of new
floor space in Mumbai. Working Paper. Available at: https://alainbertaud.com/AB_Files/AB_Mumbai_
FSI_conundrum.pdf (accessed 21 September 2023).
Bhagat RB and Yadav V (2017) Changes in slum population and living conditions of slum dwellers in Mumbai.
In UDRI (ed.) Mumbai Reader. Mumbai: UDRI, pp. 265–278.
Block F (2022) Persistent problems in the Polanyian critique of the market. In: Berndt C, Peck J and Rantisi N
(eds) Market/Place: Exploring Spaces of Exchange. Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, pp. 89–102.
Block F and Somers M (2014) The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique. Cambridge, MA
and London: Harvard University Press.
Blomley NK (2004) Unsettling the City. Urban Land and the Politics of Property. London and New York, NY:
Routledge.
Bombay High Court (2016) Case number Civil Application no. 221 of 2013.
Brill F (2022) Playing the game: A comparison of international actors in real estate development in Modderfontein,
Johannesburg and London’s Royal Docks. Geoforum 134: 197–204.
Christophers B (2016) For real: Land as capital and commodity. Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 41(2): 134–148.
D’Monte D (2006) Mills for Sale: The Way Ahead. Mumbai: Marg Publications.
Das PK, Singh G, Dewan R, et al. (2018) Chasing the Affordable Dream. A Plan to House Mumbai’s Millions.
Mumbai: Bombaykala Books.
Doshi S and Ranganathan M (2017) Contesting the unethical city: Land dispossession and corruption narratives
in urban India. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107(1): 183–199.
Dupont VDN (2011) The dream of Delhi as a global city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
35(3): 533–554.
Fairbairn M (2013) Indirect dispossession: Domestic power imbalances and foreign access to land in Mozambique.
Development and Change 44(2): 335–356.
Fernandes L (2006) India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota press.
Fraser N (2014) Can society be commodities all the way down? Post-Polanyian reflections on capitalist crisis.
Economy and Society 43(4): 541–558.
Gagné M (2021) Corporate repertoires of control and performances of power in a contested land deal in Senegal.
African Studies Review 64(3): 675–703.
Ghertner DA (2011) Gentrifying the state, gentrifying participation: Elite governance programs in Delhi.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(3): 504–532.
Ghertner DA (2014) India’s urban revolution: Geographies of displacement beyond gentrification. Environment
& Planning A 46(7): 1554–1571.
Ghosh S and Pandya D (2019) ‘Sitting ducks’: $63 bn of zombie buildings sound alarm for Indian banks.
Business Standard, 4 October. Available at: https://www.business-standard.com/article/finance/danger-
ahead-63-bn-stalled-real-estate-projects-a-threat-for-indian-banks-119100400221_1.html (accessed 10
November 2021).
Goldman M (2010) Speculative urbanism and the making of the next world city. International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research 35(3): 555–581.
Goldman M (2011) Speculating on the next World City. In: Roy A and Ong A (eds) Worlding Cities. Hoboken,
NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, pp. 229–258.
Goldman M (2023) Speculative urbanism and the urban-financial conjuncture: Interrogating the afterlives of the
financial crisis. Environment & Planning A 55: 367–387.
Goldman M and Narayan D (2021) Through the optics of finance: Speculative Urbanism and the Transformation
of Markets. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 45(2): 209–231.
Baliga 365

Halbert L and Rouanet H (2014) Filtering risk away: Global finance capital, transcalar territorial networks and
the (un)making of city-regions: An analysis of business property development in Bangalore, India. Regional
Studies 48(3): 471–484.
John N (2019) Real estate tops bankruptcy chart; construction, metals and textiles follow. Business Today, 19
February. Available at: https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/story/real-estate-tops-bankruptcy-chart-con-
struction-metals-and-textiles-follow-169150-2019-02-19 (accessed 21 September 2023).
Kallin H (2021) In debt to the rent gap: Gentrification generalized and the frontier of the future. Journal of Urban
Affairs 43(10): 1393–1404.
Levien M (2018) Dispossession Without Development. Land Grabs in Neoliberal India. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press (Modern South Asia).
Li TM (2014) Land’s End. Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Liases Foras (2018) The Housing Charter 2018. White Paper. Mumbai: Liases Foras. Available at: https://
www.liasesforas.com/admin/WhitePaper/42/WhitePaper_2019-07-23_63699491248384.pdf (accessed 21
September 2023).
Liases Foras (2019) Developer Comparison: Price, Sale Velocity, Launch [Data Set]. Mumbai.
Martin IW (2019) Land, power, and property tax limitation. In: Bartley TIM (ed.) The Politics of Land, vol. 26,
1st edn. Bingley: Emerald Publishing (Research in Political Sociology), pp.39–65.
McQuarrie M, Fernandes N and Shepard C (2013) The field of struggle the office and the flat: Protest and aspira-
tion in a Mumbai slum. Public Culture 25(2 70): 315–348.
Nandy M (2011) Red Fort Capital invests ₹250 cr in Omkar Realtors’ Mumbai project. Live Mint, 15 November.
Available at: https://www.livemint.com/Companies/9NW7bWRUGr02222nSSKMbJ/Red-Fort-Capital-
invests-Rs-250-cr-in-Omkar-Realtors8217.html (accessed 21 September 2023).
Nandy M (2012) IIFL’s new PE fund invests in Mumbai redevelopment project. Live Mint, 16 May. Available at:
https://www.livemint.com/Companies/5zCP5XFO8oJAK3LCqCGVPM/IIFL8217s-new-PE-fund-invests-
in-Mumbai-redevelopment-pro.html (accessed 10 November 2021).
Naybor D (2015) Land as fictitious commodity: The continuing evolution of women’s land rights in Uganda.
Gender, Place and Culture 22(6): 884–900.
Parkin B (2019) How India’s tallest building ended as an unfinished construction site. Financial Times, 14
July. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/9f67b996-a3ba-11e9-974c-ad1c6ab5efd1 (accessed 21
September 2023).
Patel S and Arputham J (2007) An offer of partnership or a promise of conflict in Dharavi, Mumbai? Environment
and Urbanization 19(2): 501–508.
Peck J (2013) For Polanyian economic geographies. Environment and Planning A 45(7): 1545–1568.
Polanyi K (2001) (ed.) The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston,
MA: Beacon Paperback, p.2.
Polanyi L and Kari (2018) Freedom of action and freedom of thought. In: Brie M and Thomasberger C (eds)
Karl Polanyi’s Vision of Socialist Transformation. Montreal: Black Rose, pp.18–50.
Prudham S (2013) Men and things: Karl Polanyi, primitive accumulation, and their relevance to a radical green
political economy. Environment and Planning A 45(7): 1569–1587.
Prudham S (2015) Property and commodification. In: Perreault T, Bridge G and McCarthy J (eds) The Routledge
Handbook of Political Ecology. London: Routledge, pp. 430–445.
Rahman T (2022) Landscapes of rizq: Mediating worldly and otherworldly in Lahore’s speculative real estate
market. Economic Anthropology 9(2): 297–308.
RBI (2019) Report on Trend and Progress of Banking in India 2018-19. Mumbai. Available at: https://rbidocs.
rbi.org.in/rdocs/Publications/PDFs/0RTP241219FL760D9F69321B47988DE44D68D9217A7E.PDF
(accessed 21 September 2023).
Rouanet H and Halbert L (2016) Leveraging finance capital: Urban change and self-empowerment of real estate
developers in India. Urban Studies 53: 1401–1423.
Sassen S (2013) Land grabs today: Feeding the disassembling of national territory. Globalizations 10(1): 25–46.
Searle LG (2018) The contradictions of mediation: Intermediaries and the financialization of urban production.
Economy and Society 47(4): 524–546.
Searle LG (2016) Landscapes of Accumulation. Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary
India. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press (South Asia Across the Disciplines).
Shatkin G (2014) Reinterpreting the meaning of the ‘Singapore Model’: State Capitalism and Urban Planning.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38(1): 116–137.
366 EPA: Economy and Space 56(2)

Shatkin G (2016) The real estate turn in policy and planning: Land monetization and the political economy of
peri-urbanization in Asia. Cities 53: 141–149.
Sood A (2017) Speculative urbanism. In: Orum AM (ed.) Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional
Studies. London: Blackwell, pp. 1–3.
Srivastava S (2012) How omkar cracked the messy business of slum redevelopment. Forbes India, 18 April.
Available at: https://www.forbesindia.com/article/big-bet/how-omkar-cracked-the-messy-business-of-
slum-redevelopment/32730/1 (accessed 21 September 2023).
Urs A (2020) Real estate developers sitting on unsold inventory worth ₹3,70,000 crore as of end-March: JLL
report. Business Line, 30 April. Available at: https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/real-estate/
real-estate-developers-sitting-on-unsold-inventory-worth-370000-cr-as-of-end-march-jll-report/arti-
cle31245251.ece (accessed 10 November 2021).
Weber R (2010) Selling city futures: The financialization of urban redevelopment policy. Economic Geography
86(3): 251–274.
Weber R (2021) Embedding futurity in urban governance: Redevelopment schemes and the time value of money.
Environment & Planning A 53: 503–524.
Weinstein L (2008) Mumbai’s development mafias: Globalization organized crime and land development.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(1): 22–39.
Weinstein L (2014a) One-man handled’: Fragmented Power and Political Entrepreneurship in globalizing
Mumbai. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38(1): 14–35.
Weinstein L (2014b) The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, p.23.
Yadav VK (2021) Yes Bank fraud: ED files charge sheet against omkar realtors. Hindustan Times, 2 April.
Available at: https://www.hindustantimes.com/business/yes-bank-fraud-ed-files-charge-sheet-against-
omkar-realtors-101617311858943.html (accessed 21 September 2023).

Appendix A. Omkar’s year-wise supply of real estate units (Compiled by Author, Data: Liases Foras, 2018).

Project Builder group Location Min start date Max end date Sales value (%)
Umiya Tower Omkar Realtors Mulund (E) Jan 08 Dec 11 1.73
Nirmal Kunj Omkar Realtors Nerul Apr 10 Feb 11 12.30
Omkar Roga Omkar Realtors Chembur (E) Jul 10 Dec 12 3.65
Omkar Vayu Omkar Realtors Mahim (W) Sep 11 Dec 16 1.47
1973 Omkar Omkar Realtors Worli Jan 12 Dec 19 0.76
Alta Monte Omkar Realtors Malad (E) Oct 12 Dec 21 1.04
Omkar Veda Omkar Realtors Parel Jun 11 Mar 16 1.04
Omkar Meridia Omkar Realtors Bandra (E) Jun 13 Apr 18 1.38
Omkar Ananta Omkar Realtors Goregaon (E) Mar 14 Dec 17 1.50
Kenspeckle Omkar Realtors Andheri (E) Oct 14 Dec 19 0.25
Omkar Vive Omkar Realtors Bandra (E) Feb 16 Dec 20 2.02
Omkar Signet Omkar Realtors Malad (E) May 17 Dec 20 3.94
Lawns & Beyond Omkar Realtors Jogeshwari (E) Nov 17 Sep 22 5.88
Rachana Zephyr Omkar Realtors & Rachana Baner Aug 08 Oct 10 3.40
Housing
Crescent Bay L&T Realty Parel Jan 12 Dec 22 0.93
Piramal Mahalaxmi Piramal Realty Mahalaxmi Jan 18 Jun 25 3.44