If you ask any perspiring soul emerging from a Mumbai local, or one who has just braved one of Delhi's traffic jams, how it will feel to be able to walk to the workplace, the response is likely to be wishful and dreamy eyes.
Is there a business case?
Real estate developers across the country are fast taking to the concept of walk-to-work in a bid to exploit an employee's preference to live close to his workplace. Developers like DLF, Ansal and Vatika have centred their future projects on the walk-to-work concept and are confident that they have hit upon a winning formula.
Ansal Properties and Infrastructure Ltd (APIL) is developing a 75 acre information technology project, christened 'The Campus', in Greater Noida. The 6-million sq ft project has dedicated 1 million sq ft area for residential projects.
"Walk-to-work is a revolutionary concept and in this age of 24x7 lifestyle, it will be a crowd puller. While the infrastructure sector on the whole is booming, the thrust has come from the housing sector. The concept takes into account one's housing needs while acknowledging that people don't want to put in long hours of travel on their way to work," said APIL's general manager, marketing, Aditya Vadhera.
APIL, which is investing Rs 1,500 crore (Rs 15 billion) in the Greater Noida IT project, has lined up a number of similar projects in other parts of the country.
"Information technology and business process outsourcing are lucrative segments in India and we have realised that the concept has the potential to serve these sectors in a fruitful way. We are looking to develop IT parks and integrated townships in Punjab and Rajasthan and the concept will be very much a part of all our future projects," Vadhera added.
APIL is looking to develop a chain of IT parks in Jaipur, Jodhpur, Ludhiana, Patiala, Panipat and Meerut.
Not to be left behind, DLF Commercial Developers Ltd is also incorporating the concept in its 3,000 acre DLF City township, which is set to come up in Gurgaon. The company, which triggered the corporate shift from Delhi to Gurgaon in the middle of the 1980s, has already developed a 125 acre Cyber City project in Gurgaon.
While Ansal is, at present, concentrating on North India alone, DLF is making a foray into Kolkata and is planning expansion into cities like Pune, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad. The company recently launched a Rs 600 crore (Rs 6 billion) 26.3 acre integrated township project in Hyderabad. The project will have 60 per cent space dedicated for the IT industry and the remaining 40 per cent will have housing projects.
"We pioneered the concept in the 1980s and have incorporated it in a number of projects since then. Gurgaon proved to be a very successful location because people prefer newly urbanised zones. But we are confident that the concept will succeed in other areas as well," said DLF Universal's Vice-President, Corporate Communication, Vijay Vancheswar.
Vatika Group is another company that has followed in the lines of Ansal and DLF with the launch of Vatika City in Jaipur. The project, which is also based on the walk-to-work concept, is spread over an area of 800 acres and will offer housing facilities for over 11,000 families besides commercial space spread over 8 million sq ft.
Vatika is also coming up with a 600 acre integrated township in Gurgaon, which will have both residential and commercial components.
