We are spending this week in Mumbai and living with my son in the Mumbai Dodha housing complex. At first sight, it looks like a very well-maintained housing area with a beautiful club building and swimming pool. It has two towers with 49 structural levels. My son lives on the 29th floor with bright rooms that are considerably higher than three metres. It is a very nice flat with a wonderful view of the ocean. However, they built a new skyscraper with many flats exactly between the ocean and Dodha, which now makes it impossible for many of the Dodha flat holders to see the ocean. We just manage to look around the new skyscraper.
Late in 2013, I already lived here. During my first night in 2015, I was surprised, because I seemed to remember even more noise. So what had happened? Well, the answer is easy: not far from the building we are staying in, more skyscrapers still in the construction phase rise to the sky, among others the one I just described. During our last visit, they were just in the construction process, and I mean day and night – and that had made the noise almost unbearable.
Now the construction work has been terminated one year ago. As likely as not, it will never be resumed. Because the construction company closed down. The skyscrapers facing our flat have become hideous ruins. But they are not the only closed down skyscraper construction sites in Mumbai. You can see huge building shells without any construction activity going on in many places all over the city. Many of them already look like ruins.
There is a simple explanation for this.
Either the construction companies are bankrupt. After all, in India, the concept for getting rich is simple: for instance, you start a realty project and sell the flats in advance. There is more than enough money in India. Then you build the house. Naturally, as you proceed, the costs will increase. But not only by around 70% as in Germany with huge projects. Here, too, the Indians have surpassed us.
So what do you do if you find it will cost more? You start new projects that will be planned and sold. Using the money from those projects, you finish the first building. And you use the good press you get for even more projects with which to finance the old ones. Except this is a snowball principle, isn’t it? And since they are always finite, you will soon have a few concrete skeletons sitting around. For me, they look like threatening memorials of a degenerate economic system.
Sometimes, you also see skyscraper construction sites where work has been terminated for another reason. The builder-owner dramatically ignored the official requirements. Perhaps he was hoping to get away with first creating facts which later can be cured by bakshish. Except this method is not always a success, perhaps even because the competition offered more money. Now the authority demands deconstruction.
Except how to deconstruct a skyscraper you started with twice the base area you were supposed to? So what you do is just let the concrete skeleton with all its many floors sit there. In neither case, you need to continue, because, after all, you already did your business. The money has been earned and ended up in all the various private purses.
And we are talking a lot of money. Let me take the towers I am living in with my son as an approximation: there are six flats on each level. If you have 50 levels, that means 300 flats. Depending on the situation within the tower (before the unfinished skyscraper was built right in front of it), the flats were between 1.5 million (lower floors) and two million (upper floors) USD. That gives you a total project volume of 45 million USD: Well, that should suffice for all the parties concerned to become rich: the financiers, the salespersons, the project workers, the lawyers.…
The ones who suffer are those who bought the flats. However, they are mostly so rich that they hardly notice. Besides, they also know where and how to retrieve their money. Eventually, it will be the public. As usual – the profit has already been privatised, the loss is socialized – at some future point.
Consequently, you see them more and more often, the Mumbai ruins. But it seems that nobody is really upset about them. The poor ones living down in the streets are certainly not upset. Why should they revolt against things they cannot change, anyway?
However, in Mumbai you also keep coming across new construction sites where people work industriously. Among them are those buildings that, a few years from now, are supposed to be the highest buildings used purely as living quarters world-wide…
Please note that, when writing this, I do not wish to criticise India or Mumbai – in fact, no matter what I see here, I always have to think of back home!
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
The building I am currently living in is perhaps 15 years old. Yet some of it looks like, basically, a renovation is more than due. At least if your socialization happened as middle-European as mine did.
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