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Abstract

Chinese

Increasing purchases of valuable real estate for storing capital have contributed to the soaring prices of modest housing in many global cities and in several South Asian cities such as Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. Saskia Sassen has drawn attention to the phenomenon of underutilisation of purchased properties existing alongside the acute demand for housing by low- and moderate-income households in the same cities. Despite the gravity of this issue, empirical analyses of urban land transactions remain rare, especially because such purchases often tend to be piecemeal and obscure, involving a multitude of smaller land deals and a variety of actors. This paper examines corporate purchases of urban land in Gurgaon, a city adjacent to New Delhi that has embraced neoliberal economic policies. By creating a land database for the upcoming sectors in the city, the study makes sharply visible: (1) the radical changes in property ownership patterns from agricultural land to luxury gated communities, (2) the growing corporate investments, extreme concentration of land ownership and deeply unequal distribution of urban land and (3) the use of various illicit practices by market-leading companies in land banking.

Keywords

corporate land ownership illicit India neoliberal urbanism urban land grab

Introduction

In June 2017, during an exploratory drive along Golf Course Road, a prime location in the city of Gurgaon, we encountered an intriguing place where emerging high-rises stood in stark contrast to a village settlement. Notably, young children could be seen walking around piles of waste strewn across an abandoned-looking land parcel situated adjacent to the burgeoning structures. When we returned to this site a year later, this time accompanied by an employee of a well-known real estate developer in India whom we were interviewing, almost nothing had changed. The interviewee informed us that the project developer ran into a ‘financial situation’, setting off unforeseen construction delays. Recently having heard about Unitech, a prominent developer in Gurgaon whose directors were jailed for duping homebuyers, we inquired whether the project’s developer is Unitech. He laughed and said, ‘No, it is not Unitech. Unitech is not the only one who is in the soup right now. This one is IREO’. During our discussion, he provided insights on the prevailing real estate trends in the city, informing us that an excessive amount of demand is driven by investors, accounting for 60–70% of total residential real estate transactions. These investors tend to view properties as commodities to be traded for financial gain. Following the interview, we discovered that the project under construction was the Grand Hyatt Residences designed by Foster + Partners, a globally acclaimed architectural firm based in London. Glass and steel buildings standing in isolation amidst vast expanses of lush green landscape, their architectural renderings were comparable to other residential projects proposed in the city’s new sectors. Grand Hyatt Residences is a part of IREO City, an upcoming upscale mixed-use development spread across several sectors of the city.

Learning that a single private company is developing several hundred acres of land in Gurgaon, we delve into the question of ‘Who owns the city?’– a provocative question raised by Sassen (2015, 2016a) to emphasise the financialisation of real estate and the corporate buying of urban land in recent years. We are witnessing a systematic transformation of urban land ownership patterns, with far-reaching implications for democracy and equity. Sassen notes that, ‘The type of capital entering cities has a direct impact on urban planning and urban form…The key issue is the shift in ownership mode, from modest or small to large and expensive, and from modest public properties to expensive private ones’ (cited, in Raje, 2015: 9). Remarkably, a report by the IDFC Institute (2018) reveals that Gurgaon ranks the highest in India in terms of the share of vacant formal housing as a percentage of the total residential stock, with 26% of such housing remaining unoccupied. In contrast, nearly half of Gurgaon’s population is crammed within its 35 urban villages (Rao, 2018). Krueckeberg (1995) argues that the question of ‘to whom do things belong?’ is central to planning and has the potential to address issues of distributive justice.

Debates concerning land issues in the Indian Parliament have predominantly centred around the state’s land acquisition efforts since the early 2000s (Sen, 2019). However, as resistance to land acquisition grew, significant changes were taking place in the land markets. The land prices in India increased five-fold during 2000–2013. The average prices in the metropolises are now much higher than equivalent US urban land prices. In the state of Haryana, farmland prices are ₹1 crore (over US$160,000) per acre and higher. Levien (2015: 147) notes that following liberalisation, India transitioned from a regime that dispossessed land for state-led industrial projects (production of commodities) to one that now dispossesses land for private and increasingly less productive investments, essentially the commodification of land itself. In a recent study, Chakravorty and Palit (2019) argue that the land debate must be refocused from its current fixation with land acquisition and state action to include real estate markets.

Reframing the land debate to bring attention to the land markets is crucial in cities such as Gurgaon where land was largely bought directly from farmers by private companies. It is worth noting that private companies have increasingly played a significant role in the financing, design and management of the city in various political economies since the 1990s. Market-leading private companies constitute an essential object of study in the discussion of a neoliberal city as they embody the features of a now-global capitalism and contribute to its expansion (Lorrain, 2017). However, despite their significance, the field of urban studies often overlooks the analysis of an urban firm, including its history, vision, operations, ownership structure, long-term policies, local practices and relationships with city authorities. Addressing this gap, Lorrain (2017) argues that the urban firm serves as a key actor for evaluating the influence of neoliberalism on cities. Therefore, this paper aims to bridge this gap by providing insights into the ownership and control of urban land in Gurgaon by private companies. First, the paper discusses recent global urban trends – corporate buying of land, underutilisation of bought property and the growing prevalence of illicit practices in the urban development realm. Second, it describes the neoliberal policies governing Gurgaon’s urban development. Third, it delineates the methods used for developing a land database for peri-urban Gurgaon. The fourth section focuses on upcoming Golf Course Extension (GCE) Road development. Fifth, we present findings – the extent of land ownership concentration and particulars of leading landowning companies and their business practices. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion on corporate land purchases and real estate capital’s excessive influence over the shape of contemporary cities.

Urban land for storing (and hiding) capital

Real estate is the world’s most significant store of wealth. According to London-based real estate advisor Savills (Savills Impacts, 2021), the value of the world’s real estate reached US$326.5t in 2020. It is almost four times more valuable than global GDP. Residential real estate accounted for the largest share (US$258.5t), about 79% of all global real estate value, with agricultural, commercial and forestry making up the remaining. The absorption of capital by residential real estate is one of the key characteristics of financialised capitalism (Fernandez and Aalbers, 2016). Housing is increasingly being treated as an investment vehicle rather than a social good. Sassen (2016a) examines the top 100 cities that are recipients of massive corporate investments and account for 10% of the world population but 30% of the world’s GDP and 76% of the world’s property investment. Capital is clearly being concentrated in select urban areas. The current trends indicate a sharp scale-up in the buying of real estate, soaring new construction and the expansion of large-scale developments with vast footprints that eliminate the traditional urban fabric (Sassen, 2015). Self-contained sequestered spaces of corporatised ‘privatopias’ and ‘fortified enclaves’ for the wealthy have become a dominant feature of the contemporary cities on a global scale since the ascendancy of neoliberalism (Murray, 2017). Sassen’s (2015, 2016b) study on the radical transformation of ownership in cities and the urban takeover by corporate investors emphasises the problem of the ‘weak utility function’ of the purchased property and the faltering capacity of existing urban legal regimes to govern this explosion in property acquisitions. The value of the property increasingly resides in its ownership or control, rather than how the property is used. More and more real estate properties are being sold to absentee investors such as hedge funds, private equity firms and wealthy individuals who view property as a safe place to park (and hide) their money (Stein, 2019). Increasing purchases of valuable real estate for storing capital have also contributed to the rising prices of modest housing in many global cities and in certain South Asian cities such as Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. Notably, the underutilisation of bought properties exists alongside the extremely high demand for housing by low- and moderate-income households in the same cities (Sassen, 2016b).

Urban land is considered a profitable investment at a time when financial markets are unpredictable and volatile (Sassen, 2016a). Urban land acquisitions are often legitimised in the name of ‘development’. Van Noorloos et al. (2019) unpack the dichotomy that presents urban land investments as development and rural land investments as grabs. The term ‘land-grab’ implies an aspect of illegality, deception or injustice in the process of land acquisition (Carter and Harding, 2015). The land-grab literature traditionally centres on international dynamics which have facilitated large-scale redistribution of rural landholdings from local owners in the Global South to transnational actors (Zoomers, 2010). The land-grab debate is now progressively considering the impacts of land deals in cities (Zoomers et al., 2017). Steel et al. (2017) argue that there is a need to focus beyond large-scale ‘new city’ projects. Such urban projects have long been condemned for intensifying socio-economic polarisation through the working of real estate markets (e.g. Swyngedouw et al., 2002), whereas fragmented neoliberal urbanisation remains common yet understudied. Indeed, urban land grabs often tend to be piecemeal and obscure, involving a multitude of smaller land deals and a variety of actors with the common purpose of storing capital and increasing its value (Steel et al., 2017).

Another phenomenon that appears to be working in tandem with the aforementioned trends is the increasing incidences of real estate fraud and corruption in the economies of both income-rich and income-poor countries (Whyte and Wiegratz, 2016). The field of urban studies has underexamined the ‘illicit side of development’ (Chiodelli, 2019) even though urban land is an increasingly valuable commodity which opens up possibilities for malpractices. Moreover, such studies tend to be organised around ‘corruption of public office’ (Wedel, 2015), consequently overlooking the issue of private sector fraud (Whyte and Wiegratz, 2016). Debates on fraud and corruption are gaining traction given the recent revelations on secretive offshore companies’ financial and legal records from the Pandora Papers, the Panama Papers and the like. It is widely recognised that drawing a line among categories such as formal and informal, licit and illicit and legal and illegal in urban economies is challenging. ‘There is a complex regulatory mosaic as the (il)legal and (il)licit are woven together in complex ways in cities and regions throughout the economic landscape’ (Hudson, 2020: 162). Generally, ‘illegal’ refers to an action or behaviour that is explicitly prohibited by law. Whereas, ‘illicit’ refers to an activity that may not be explicitly prohibited but is still considered socially or morally unacceptable. We use the term ‘illicit’ in this paper to signal practices that are either legal yet socially unacceptable or are outright illegal in the context of Gurgaon.

The neoliberal landscape of Gurgaon

Neoliberalism has had a considerable impact in the Global South in relation to increasing levels of poverty and inequality, privatisation of the commons and the growing power of financial capital (Boden, 2011). Neoliberal economic reforms began to be articulated in India in the 1980s but were institutionalised in the form of New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1991 as a response to the economic crisis in India (Ahmed et al., 2012). During this period, Indian cities turned towards privatisation of basic services, withdrawal of the state from urban planning, public–private partnerships (PPP), urban restructuring to expand space for elitist consumptions and exposure to global economic forces and competition. Gurgaon (Gurugram) is one such city built and managed largely by private companies. A herald of neoliberal planning, Gurgaon transitioned from an ordinary village into a global financial landmark within two decades (Searle, 2016). We carefully chose Gurgaon as an extreme case for this research study, because, as Sassen (2014: 1) argues, ‘They make sharply visible what might otherwise remain confusingly vague’. An extreme case can serve as exemplary manifestation of largely invisible urban processes at work. Rather than seeing a seemingly peculiar place as a discrete entity, we consider it as a visible symptom of processes that are often not immediately evident. The widening economic disparity since India’s neoliberal shift is evident in Gurgaon, particularly in the stark contrast between the city’s substantial vacant formal housing and the overcrowded urban villages that accommodate nearly half of Gurgaon’s population. Further, Gurgaon serves as an excellent case for examining fragmented neoliberal urbanisation which remains common yet understudied (Steel et al., 2017).

Gurgaon exemplifies ‘state-facilitated market-rule’ where the politician–bureaucrat–developer nexus controls the real estate market to foster business-friendly environments (Chatterji, 2013; Goldstein, 2016; Rajagopalan and Tabarrok, 2014; Searle, 2016). It is a city bordering New Delhi within the National Capital Region (NCR) in the state of Haryana. The NCR is an inter-state conurbation comprising several cities including Gurgaon, Faridabad, Noida and Ghaziabad with National Capital Territory (New Delhi) at its centre. Gurgaon began to distinguish itself from Delhi’s other satellite towns in the 1990s, and by 2008 it was becoming one of India’s global economic landmarks, providing high-paying jobs to Indian middle classes and attracting foreign investments (Kalyan, 2017). In popular media and scholarly articles, Gurgaon has been described as the land of paupers and princes, of crorepatis (millionaires) and cowherds, of contradictions and paradoxes, of dynamism and dysfunction, a private city and a failure in planning.

Gurgaon’s transformation from farmlands to financial landmark traces back to Delhi’s first regional development plan of 1962. The planning authority declared Gurgaon unfit for development due to inadequate water resources, and therefore only a modest growth was recommended for this town (Gururani, 2013). Whereas Faridabad was envisioned to become a ‘new town’ embracing Nehru’s dream of modern India. Gurgaon received little attention and remained a ‘village’ with cheaper land prices until politicians and private developers began manipulating development laws and ‘controlled areas’ in their favour (Debroy and Bhandari, 2009; Gururani, 2013). In the 1980s, the Haryana government pioneered in deregulating the participation of private developers in the real estate industry. It took advantage of Gurgaon’s proximity to New Delhi and the international airport for accruing investments and revenues into the state of Haryana. The further liberalisation of the real estate industry in 2005–06 precipitated a construction frenzy in Gurgaon as developers rushed to build space for non-resident Indians (NRIs) and the extremely wealthy. Foreign direct investment (FDI) in Indian real estate and the availability of institutional financing to developers enabled large speculative urban projects in the city (Searle, 2016). Remarkably, Gurgaon grew at a much faster pace than Faridabad. The city is now saturated with advertisements of ‘world-class’ architecture with green pastoral settings akin to American suburbia to make the city attractive for residents as well as financial capital (Gururani, 2013). However, Gurgaon’s architecture projects are speculative gambles based on forecasted social and economic changes (Searle, 2016). The real estate market in Gurgaon was hit hard following the financial crisis of 2008, with debt-laden developers struggling with slow sales, delayed construction and stalled projects. The glossy architectural renderings of urban enclaves in Gurgaon did not materialise into neatly envisioned globalised landscapes (Shatkin, 2017).

Land database development

The Department of Revenue & Disaster Management in Haryana is actively engaged in the digitisation of the record of rights, cadastral maps and integration of textual and spatial data to ensure transparency and minimise discrepancies in land-related matters. Similar mapping projects are underway across India as part of the Digital India Land Record Modernisation Programme (DILRMP) launched in 2008. This programme is considered a significant step by the Indian government towards improving World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) ranking of India for bolstering foreign investment activities. Empirical studies on India’s land ownership patterns have been limited due to the restricted accessibility of land records from the Revenue Department. We use the data available in the public domain in 2019–2020 from the Haryana Land Record Information System (HALRIS) and Gurgaon Metropolitan Development Authority to develop a land ownership database. Despite the significant progress made in digitising land records in Haryana, there may still exist discrepancies between the spatial and textual records, and the information may be outdated as different authorities maintain these records. Nonetheless, these data sources remain the most reliable official land records available to the public.

Cadastral maps primarily provide information on agricultural land and often leave out the village settlements, while urban property ownership records are not a priority for the DILRMP. Given the limited availability of urban land data, this study aimed to examine the amount of land purchased from agricultural landowners for urban development projects. Although the available data was sufficient for mapping land ownership in peri-urban Gurgaon, investigating beneficial owners of the land proved challenging due to the covert nature of illicit activities in land markets. For example, during the preliminary phase of our study, we conducted a search for ownership records of the land parcels associated with IREO’s signature project, The Grand Arch was sanctioned by the Department of Town and Country Planning (DTCP), Haryana in 2008. The approved plans for this Group Housing development indicate that the licence was granted to SU Estates Pvt. Ltd. However, it was IREO that marketed and developed the project. The apartment buyer’s agreement for this project reveals the involvement of six companies namely SU Estates, Bulls Realtors, Hi-Energy Realtors, Adson Software, High Profile Realtors and Massif Conbuild, referred to as ‘confirming parties’. The document describes the confirming parties as ‘amongst themselves the absolute owners in possession of freehold land admeasuring approx. 21.144 acres at present, which area is likely to increase upon the acquisition and licensing of additional areas’. Interestingly, most of these companies, including IREO Pvt. Ltd., have their registered offices at the same address in Neeti Bagh, New Delhi. Notably, the Haryana Development & Regulation of Urban Areas Act of 1975 stipulates that a developer must own land in their own name to apply for a development licence. Additionally, the name of the licence-holder of a project must be prominently displayed in advertisements. If other parties are involved, the licensee of a project must seek permission from the DTCP for joint development and marketing rights.

Many obscure companies form complex layers of ownership, making it challenging to determine the concentration of land ownership. To address this issue, our study uses a combination of public land records, company directories, internet leaks and news articles to create a comprehensive land database and unravel the identity of lesser-known companies and examine the extent of land concentration. We use the following steps to organise the raw data (see Online Supplemental Material for flow chart). (1) The read-only map layers of administrative boundaries and cadastral data from OneMap Gurugram were added to ArcGIS Pro project for tracing the khasra units and creating vector feature data. Khasra number is a survey number given to a particular parcel of land in the villages in Haryana and Punjab. (2) The Revenue Department’s HALRIS was used to search for owners’ names, usually written in Devanagari script, for each land parcel and added to our database manually. (3) The landowners were categorised into three main groups: individuals, private companies and city/rural authorities. (4) We translated the names of each of the private companies to English and searched for their details from Ministry of Corporate Affairs and online directories of businesses such as Bloomberg, Corpository and QuickCompany. The companies’ date of incorporation, directors, addresses and other information were noted. These particulars in conjunction with the licence documents from DTCP and news articles facilitated linking the companies to well-known developers.

Golf Course Extension (GCE) Road

We conduct assessments of land purchases in an upcoming area that spans GCE Road, stretching from Golf Course Road to the national highway (NH-248A) and covering sectors 58–67 on the southeast urban fringe, situated between the villages of Ghata and Badshahpur. Over the past few years, the Information Technology/Information Technology Enabled Services (IT/ITeS) sector emerged as a primary employer in NCR, thereby evolving as one of the major drivers of the city’s real estate market. The city boasts over 50% of the NCR’s office stock, spread across DLF’s Cyber City and Golf Course Road development. The latter is particularly desirable, with residential prices ranging from ₹12,500 to ₹14,500 (US$170–200) per sq. ft (Knight Frank, 2016), which is a stark contrast to the median annual household income of US$3168 in the country. As a result of the high demand and exorbitant rental rates in DLF’s Cyber City and Golf Course Road, the GCE Road area is forecast to become an extension of these markets.

The land along GCE Road was predominantly owned by Gujars, an agro-pastoral caste, who relied on meagre livelihoods from cattle rearing due to the promotion of canal irrigation in Central and West Punjab and discouragement of it in the arid hilly region of East Punjab (now Haryana) during the British colonial rule. Rather, East Punjab was promoted for the supply of draught animals and fodder crops. The uneven socio-legal terrain that privileged landowning castes such as Jats, following the Green Revolution, left pastoral farmers like Gujars, smallholders and landless farmers at a disadvantage, ‘a fate that was to change, for some, with the coming of the urban revolution in the nineties’ (Gururani, 2020: 978). Private developers began buying land in this region around the time when the first draft development plan for Gurgaon was published on 11 July 2006. While the village settlements, known as Lal Dora areas, still exist, the surrounding agricultural land was bought for the purpose of ‘development’. The Lal Dora system originated during the British rule in 1908. The term literally means ‘red line’ that was drawn on the maps to delineate the village settlements from the agricultural taxable land for revenue records. Under the Punjab Scheduled Roads and Controlled Areas Restriction of Unregulated Development Act of 1963, all Lal Dora land was excluded from urbanisation. As a result, the Haryana state and the private sector were only able to acquire agricultural land, leading to the preservation of pockets of urban villages (Cowan, 2018). The compensation provided to farmers for their agricultural land varied significantly. While a small number of farmers became exceptionally wealthy in the urbanisation process, numerous others lost their means of livelihood and regularly face hardship in the face of housing and employment precarity. Some affluent farmers held on to their land or purchased less expensive plots farther away from the city and play active entrepreneurial roles in land speculation as real estate dealers and brokers.

Initially, many villagers sold their land in fear of land acquisition by the government and unfair compensation. Cowan (2018) examines the tactics employed by developers to acquire land unlawfully or opportunistically from farmers and smallholders. One common strategy involved the use of falsified government acquisition notices, which developers would present to farmers in order to convince them to sell their land. For instance, in 2009, the Haryana government had issued notification to acquire 1400 acres of land (sectors 58–67) in the villages near GCE Road for ‘public purpose’ under Section 4 of the Land Acquisition Act. As the compensation for land acquisition was based on circle rates rather than market rates,¹ the unnerved agricultural landowners sold their land to private developers to seek fairer compensation. However, soon the government released 95% of the land proposed for acquisition to private developers and granted them licences for residential and commercial projects (Choudhry, 2018). As a result, much of the land along GCE Road is caught up in Central Bureau of Investigation probe for misuse of state power for the benefit of private interests. The Haryana state facilitated land grabs by enabling sale of land to influential private developers at throwaway prices (Pandey, 2019). Some planning officials not only traded reserved and confidential information with selective developers as bargaining chips for personal gain but also actively assisted the developers by issuing land acquisition notifications for ‘public purpose’ and changing its decision subsequently (Firstpost, 2012; Singh, 2013).

Leading real estate companies and their business practices

The land database for GCE Road reveals that private companies purchased more than half of the total area in six sectors (Figure 1, Table 1). The land parcels around urban villages remain with the individuals. It should be noted that the mapped area does not include urban villages (Ghata, Behrampur, Ullahawas and Badshahpur) for analysis due to the complexity involved in mapping and documenting each small plot in a village settlement as well as missing data for Lal Dora areas. Since we are primarily concerned with the purchase of agricultural land and change of land use, the exclusion of village settlements from the mapped area does not impact on our analysis. The extended Lal Dora areas account for the concentration of individual private ownership of land around the villages. The Haryana government owns about 5% of the mapped land, a large part of which consists of an electrical substation in sector 58. The areas indicating unknown owners are concentrated along the roads.

Figure 1.

Types of owners.

Table 1.

Types of landowners.

Type		Area (Acres)
0	Unknown (includes sector roads)	574.73	22.03%
1	Individuals	523.84	20.07%
2	Private companies	1344.75	51.54%
3	City/rural authorities	131.85	5.05%
4	Other (religious, trusts etc.)	33.88	1.29%
	Total (Mapped Area)	2609.05

While numerous companies hold licences for land ownership in the area, a majority of them can be traced back to a handful of well-known developers. Many of these companies were incorporated between 2005 and 2007, coinciding with the opening of India’s real estate market to foreign direct investment (FDI). While some companies clearly operate as subsidiaries of larger holding companies, others are more elusive and function as shell companies. Although owning a shell company is not illegal, its misuse has become increasingly prevalent. One of the most well-known illicit uses of a shell company is for the purpose of money laundering and buying benami property. Due to the lack of transparency in ownership and financial transactions, shell companies can facilitate illegal activities. Benami property refers to a property purchased by an individual under a name other than their own. Benami transactions are employed to disguise true ownership for purposes such as tax evasion, parking unaccounted money, or maintaining secrecy. Such transactions are prohibited under the Benami Transactions (Prohibition) Act of 1988, as they are associated with fraudulent practices. Through our analysis of the land database, we have identified the major purchasers of agricultural land along GCE Road. Table 2 presents the percentages of land controlled and developed by the top three private companies: Emaar, IREO and M3M (see Figure 2). They are primarily involved in real estate activities such as buying, selling, renting and operating self-owned or leased property such as apartment and commercial buildings, as well as developing and subdividing land into plots. Use of offshore accounts to shield assets worth millions of dollars, foreign branding of their real estate projects, political affiliations and illicit land purchases are common traits that run across these companies.

Table 2.

Top three real estate companies.

Private Companies (PC)	Emaar	IREO	M3M	Others	Total
Land area (in acres)	533.85	439.63	136.37	234.89	1344.75
% Area of total area owned by PC	39.69%	32.69%	10.14%	17.46%

Figure 2.

Land parcels purchased by the top three companies.

IREO

IREO is a real estate development company established in 2004 that has offices in India, Mauritius and the United States. It is one of the largest FDI based private equity fund in India. According to the company, it has invested US$1.5b in a portfolio of urban projects across 3000 acres of owned land in India and has developed into a fully integrated real estate company developing projects consisting of master-planned gated communities, mixed-use spaces and industrial parks including Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Many of their projects are concentrated in sectors 58–61. The mixed-use hospitality project in sector 58 that we described in previous sections of this paper is being developed by IREO Hospitality Company Private Limited (IHCPL). IHCPL entered into an operating and management agreement with Hyatt for this project and appointed Foster+Partners and Tony Chi & Associates as project designers. IHCPL is a subsidiary of IXO Limited. IXO is a Mauritius based company owned by IREO group. The company also partnered with The Trump Organization and signed a licensing agreement in 2016 for an office building.

The land database indicates that several private limited companies own the land in the sectors along GCE Road that are linked to IREO group such as Fiverivers Buildcon, Fiverivers Township, Hi Energy Realtors, High Star Builders, Commander Realtors, Base Exports, SU Estates, Buzz Hotels, Bulls Realtors, Ornamental Realtors, Massif Conbuild and High Responsible Realtors. All these companies were incorporated between 2004 and 2007. DTCP’s licence documents indicate that these companies owned the land and were given development licences where IREO projects are proposed or built. These relatively unknown companies are registered at the same address. While navigating the ownership records in the city, we discovered that in 2018, IREO was accused of defrauding investors of US$1.5b by creating a network of shadow companies to bypass laws that prevent foreign investors from buying agricultural land. Global investment companies Axon Capital and Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, who invested about ₹2000cr (over US$270m) in IREO, filed criminal complaints against the firm (Carville, 2018). A former CEO of the company testified to having witnessed ‘various acts of cheating, fraud and misappropriation of money’ that created huge wrongful gains for the firm’s managing director and associates (Sullivan, 2018). In November 2021, the co-founder and managing director of IREO was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) for alleged money laundering, specifically the diversion of US$77m of home buyers’ funds. The Pandora Papers also revealed that four entities, which are beneficially owned by IREO’s co-founder and hold overseas assets worth more than US$77.73m, were involved in the scandal (The Financial Express, 2021).

Emaar Properties

Emaar Properties is a Dubai based international property developer founded in 1997. It is a public joint-stock company listed on the Dubai Financial Market and has a valuation of US$15.5b as of June 2021. In 2000, Emaar’s shareholders voted to allow up to 20% of Emaar’s stock to be held by foreigners, making it the first company to allow non-nationals to buy shares in a UAE-based company. The construction of Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Mall, their signature projects, began in 2003. By 2004, the company formed a subsidiary known as Emaar International to expand their business to foreign markets. Emaar India, one of its prominent subsidiary companies, entered into a joint venture with MGF Developments Ltd. of India in early 2005 for development and sale of integrated townships and invested ₹8500cr (over US$1b) through Emaar MGF Land Ltd. Emaar India has since built several residential projects along GCE Road, particularly in sectors 62, 65 and 66.

Emaar MGF Land Ltd. formed many subsidiaries that purchased the land along GCE Road such as Active Promoters, Garland Estates, Hammock Buildwell, Casing Properties, Forsythia Propbuild and Prezzie Buildcon. In 2013, Emaar MGF was accused by the Indian government of violating foreign exchange rules by diverting FDI money to buy thousands of acres of agricultural land (The Hindu, 2013). The Indian government prohibits the utilisation of foreign funds for buying agricultural land, thereby, preventing speculative purchases from poor farmers. The subsidiaries facilitated the diversion of foreign investment funds into agricultural land purchases. The funds in question were received from UAE, Cyprus, Mauritius and other tax havens. In 2016, Emaar MGF Land decided to split and filed a demerger scheme to divide the company assets among Emaar India and MGF Developments. This decision was made over a year after MGF Developments’ owner was found on the HSBC Geneva list. According to The Indian Express investigation of Pandora Papers, within two years of the formation of Emaar MGF, a British Virgin Islands (BVI) firm invested US$2m in the joint venture. MGF Developments’ owner was the ultimate beneficial owner of a company in BVI and is accused by the ED of tax evasion, money laundering, forged documents in land deals and business ties with politicians, among other illicit practices (Yadav, 2021). Since the two companies parted ways, the former partners have been involved in legal disputes and accusations of fraud in land deals against each other (Jha, 2021).

M3M Group

M3M is headquartered in Gurgaon and was incorporated by Basant Bansal and Roop Bansal in 2007. Formerly known as M3M India, it has become a leading developer of luxury residential and commercial real estate in India and has over 2200 acres of land in the National Capital Region (NCR) (Haidar, 2021). With a net worth of ₹910cr (∼US$120m), the Bansal brothers are now among India’s top 100 richest realty tycoons. The land database shows Manglam Multiplex (MM) Pvt. Ltd. as owners of many land parcels along GCE Road. The land records in conjunction with development licence documents and approved building plans indicate that MM has close ties with M3M. It is functioning as a land-holding company for M3M projects.

M3M launched The Trump Tower luxury residential project along the GCE Road in collaboration with Tribeca Developers in 2018. Tribeca’s founder, Kalpesh Mehta, pushed for branded development in India by introducing the Trump brand to the local market. The advertisements that were widely circulated showcased the project as a joint venture of M3M and Tribeca Developers. A disclaimer on the project website lists Olive Realcon Private Limited as the owner and developer of the property. On the contrary, MM is the licence-holder and owner of the Trump Towers according to the official documents from the DTCP and Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA). However, the company’s name is missing from the advertisements. DTCP served a show cause notice on MM for violating norms mandating display of licence-holder of the project in advertisements. Manglam Multiplex and Olive Realcon have common directors and are linked to M3M Group. The Trump brand was used mainly for the purpose of commercial visibility and reaping earnings without the approval of DTCP Haryana (Rao, 2018). Besides manoeuvring the development laws, M3M has also been accused of massive tax evasion and bribing forest officials to clear-cut land for development (Yadav, 2017). According to the Hindustan Times (Moudgil, 2011), the company was raided by income tax authorities which yielded ₹314cr (USD $42m) in unaccounted transactions for land purchase. In March 2022, the Delhi Police registered a first information report (FIR) against M3M India on charges of cheating and defrauding MGF Developments Limited of ₹450cr in the land transaction of 31.06 acres in Gurgaon.

Conclusions

A key assumption of the neoliberalisation thesis is the growing influence of market actors on policy making. Leading urban firms embody the features of a now-global capitalism and contribute to its expansion (Lorrain, 2017). ‘Nevertheless, these actors, their strategies and their practices are very rarely [examined] in a systematic manner in this body of literature’ (Pinson and Morel Journel, 2017: 26). In this paper, our analysis delves into private companies as part of the investigation into the question of ‘who owns the city’, with a focus on Gurgaon. By embracing the question posed by Saskia Sassen, we embark on an analysis of the key actors and influential forces that drive urban development and exert control over valuable resources. This question serves as a catalyst for grasping the dynamics of power, wealth and inequality within the urban landscape, urging us to advocate for more inclusive and equitable practices in urban planning and governance. Broadly, our study shows how neoliberal urbanism leads to speculative practices where land and properties are bought or held for the purpose of financial gain rather than productive use. Large corporations or wealthy investors often have the means to acquire and control significant land parcels, leading to a concentration of ownership and an influence on urban development trajectories. Planning decisions in neoliberal economies are driven by profit motives rather than the needs and aspirations of local communities, resulting in the prioritisation of high-end real estate and exclusionary urban forms.

Specifically, our analysis of Gurgaon brings into sharp focus the significant transformations occurring in property ownership patterns, marked by the transition from agricultural land to luxury gated communities, the surge of corporate investments, the concentration of land ownership and the deeply unequal distribution of urban land. The study reveals the dominant companies that wield quasi-monopolistic control over peri-urban Gurgaon and provides insights into their business practices. These companies began buying peri-urban land following the liberalisation of the Indian real estate sector in 2005. Prime urban land has been earmarked to serve the investment needs of the wealthy and the profit-seeking motives of businesses. Sassen (2016b) has argued that the trend of corporate buying of urban land has led to ‘de-urbanising’ or emptying of urban properties in the cities of the Global North. The ‘weak utility function’ of bought property is evident in Gurgaon as well, existing alongside high demand for housing by low- and medium-income groups. Moreover, our investigation brings to light the extensive utilisation of subsidiaries and shell companies by the leading private companies in Gurgaon as a means to evade prevailing urban development regulations and obfuscate the true beneficiaries involved in these practices. These market-leading companies exhibit a prevalence of dubious business practices in land deals such as money laundering, massive tax evasions, non-compliance with foreign exchange laws and FDI policy, and benami transactions.

While our study lies at the crux of the conceptual framework of ‘urban informality’, which underscores the continuum of legality and illegality within the realm of urban housing (Roy, 2005, 2009), it specifically concentrates on one of the key actors in urban development, namely urban firms. By directing attention to the urban land markets as determinants of housing inequality and urban poverty, our research seeks to bridge this analytical gap. The study uncovers the fragmented nature of neoliberal urbanism in Gurgaon that involves smaller land deals dispersed across the city leading to gradual concentration of land ownership. It exposes the global phenomenon of an oversupply of high-end residential properties resulting from speculative tendencies. However, it is crucial to also highlight the illicit practices employed by the leading companies operating in Gurgaon. These companies rely on unfair markets and unethical business strategies to acquire extensive tracts of sought-after urban land. Consequently, Gurgaon’s neoliberal urbanism is intertwined with an illicit landscape, where illegal activities thrive alongside the broader urbanisation processes. We acknowledge that not all manifestations of neoliberal urbanism are inherently associated with illicit practices, as the presence of illegitimate activities can be observed within different political economies beyond the purview of neoliberalism. Yet, this study raises the question of whether neoliberalisation has contributed to the proliferation of illicit state-corporate practices in the urban realm. The knowledge gap of the significance of illegality within the economies of ‘successful’ cities primarily stems from the formidable barriers that researchers encounter when attempting to investigate these opaquely structured processes. The city governments need to disclose information on what private companies own to delve deeper into the issue of land inequality. The question of ‘who owns the city’ should be prioritised in urban research in the coming years to give people, planners and policymakers a foundation for fostering a just city.

Supplemental Material

sj-jpg-1-usj-10.1177_00420980231184784 – Supplemental material for Who owns the city? Neoliberal urbanism and land purchases in Gurgaon, India

Supplemental material, sj-jpg-1-usj-10.1177_00420980231184784 for Who owns the city? Neoliberal urbanism and land purchases in Gurgaon, India by Meher Bhagia and Mallika Bose in Urban Studies

Footnotes

We thank Dr. Madhuri Desai,Dr. Brian King and Dr. Melissa Wright for their feedback on some earlier versions of the manuscript. We would like to acknowledge the support of Dr. Ute Poerschke,and the Penn State Stuckeman School where the bulk of this paper was written. We are grateful to the editors and the three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

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

Funding

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

ORCID iD

Meher Bhagia

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

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