Locational Logistics
NEOM, the New Urban Area being developed by the Government of Saudi Arabia in North-West of the Arabia, is an example of modern urban care and development. Apart from conservation, and avoiding the degradation of the environment, it is a very people-friendly idea. The comfort theory being tried out, in “The Line” concept, is to have all that you would require in a living area to be within FIVE kilometres of you. Thus, the place where you live, the place you work, the places where you shop, the schools and colleges your children will need to go; the places for your wholesome entertainment and relaxation, and the hospitals, if and when necessary, should all be withing 5 kilometres of place where you live. But this is nothing new; it was part of all urban planning earlier too.
Somehow, somewhere, sometime, in the recent past, this concept got lost in the mire of crass and very fast urban expansion in the laissez faire approach. The development controls of the local city governments were more associated with restrictions of heights and sizes of the units, for example, than with any quality needs and inputs. The controls by the Statutory bodies are more statistically driven than with the importance due for the felt needs of the occupants. And growth is left to the ever increasing demand for more and more houses and offices. And that’s all!
To some extent, in a few places, a Master Plan of the Land notifying the various zones for being Residential, Commercial, Industrial, etc., has been ordained. A Road network is also shown, areas designated for Schools and Gardens and Parks. But this remains a Plan more and often on paper. Its implementation is haphazard, and left to the vagaries of lop-sided development. Roads are not connected; the land for the gardens and the parks will get encroached and what is highly in demand only will be developed!
In this manner of development commuting in traffic in vastly congested areas has become a sheer and colossal waste of very precious time.
I know of a young couple, who earn more than Rs 20,00,000/- (Rupees Twenty Lakhs , or Rupees 2 Million), per mensem. She is a doctor and he is a finance executive. They spend, respectively, eight hours per diem in their air-conditioned cars going from their very spacious, nice and posh flat in Powai to their respective places of work in Versova, Andheri (West) and Mid-Town Parel.
The travails of the ordinary Mumbai commuter by the local trains, some 6 or 7 million people traveling to and fro Southwards in the mornings and Northwards in the Evenings, from their homes and their offices, and back, per day is all too well known to all, but rarely experienced by the Planners!
People living in NOIDA have to drive to work in Gurgaon and vice versa. What a humongous waste of time, energies, and resources.
Urban planners, with an old vision, have addressed this commuting problem, in NEOM by a concentrated development of an easily approachable location.
This current note is NOT about the overly harassed commuters, but a study in the logistic for the builders in the projects, they are taking up.
In the olden days, Government just provided the infrastructure: roads and drains, were all that were needed then. Look at Jaipur founded in 1725, by Sawai Jai Singh. Apart from the geometrically well laid roads and drains, designed by his visionary Architect, Vidya Dhar Singh, the Founder of the City bearing his name, Jaipur, he had also decreed that all the buildings facing the main roads will be painted pink. Hence began the “Pink City” of India.
Much later came, Lutyens for New Delhi and Le Corbusier for Chandigarh. But the DDA, which succeeded Lutyens and these, as with the PWD, became the format of the standard box-type buildings. Lands were then mostly sold or allotted for the individuals, or a group of people, to build their houses or palaces!
The concept of a “builder”, who will first begin to build the house only to sell it to the actual user came much later. Some 70 or 72 years ago, in the early 1950s. It seems so far away that only the last name of the person who “invented” this concept of “ownership of flats” is remembered: Luthria. The Founder of the Raheja Empire was his broker, earning just Rs 200 as the commission for the first sale by him. And today the Raheja Empire is probably worth over Rs 200 Billion, and more!
The builders were then, as almost now, totally at the mercy of the landowners. They would develop whatever land was made available to them, or whatever they were lucky to get. The logistics of the locational advantage or disadvantage was just being discovered. Bombay, as then known was only just moving into a “geo-suburban” way of developing: suburb by suburb, or parts thereof. As Bandra and Khar, designed and developed by the British Government of Bombay, with broad roads and drainage laid out, and with the Electric Company providing the power connections, individual plots were allotted to various people who had in the 1930s and 1940s built their own bungalows, or neat little cottages, grew and grew with lots of trees and greenery, it came to be known as the “Queen of the Suburbs”.
Even before this concept of the “geo-suburban growth”, Bombay had always developed away from the original hub of Bombay – the Port of Bombay! When peace had begun to prevail in the 1790s or 1800s, the British demolished their Fort walls, and the Esplanade was born. Then Bhuleshwar. Then the Cumballa and Malabar Hills. Mumbai crawled northwards to Mahalaxmi, Dadar, Shivaji Park and Mahim, in bungalows, or buildings of ground plus two or three floors. And all these were buildings owned by individuals. Till the invention by Mr Elisha Otis, the inventor of “Vertical Transportation”, Bombay could not grow very high skywards, as its successor-in-name, Mumbai, is now so hugely doing!
Even then the people lucky enough to get open plots built houses, with three or four floors, and let out portions of that on rent. The entire Marine Drive was a fabulous example of that! Or, wonderful housing complexes like Cusrow Baugh, Khareghat Colony or the Tata Blocks were another example of wise organisations building and owning the units for their people to live in as tenants, even in perpetuity. But tenants of those premises, even if inherited as a tenant son of the father tenant, they always remained, tenants.
Then came the concept of the individual ownership of the flats in a multi-storied building, with the building along with the land on which it stood, being a commonly owned entity. The initial problems of maintaining that brought about the Bombay Co-operative Societies Act in 1960, itself. And soon came the MOFA and MAO, the Maharashtra Ownership Flats Act, 1970 and the Maharashtra Apartment Ownership Act, 1970. This was the beginning of the “Socialization of Land”! The land along with the building was to be owned by a common denominator, the members as a Group, and not an individual exploiter of the housing scenario, as landlords were wont to be, was this unique change.
However, very soon, the idea of “OWNING” your own home, be it a one-room and a kitchen apartment, or a large three-bedroom one, had caught on. The need for a roof over one’s head is a strong motivator for ownership. The entire Real Estate market depends upon Man’s basic need to own his own home.
Builders then began their projects wherever the land was available – a plot here or a plot there. But this could not have continued for long, as open plots, or plots with old buildings were soon built upon, and none was so easily available, by the 1970s.
Perhaps the first of the builders who realised and recognised the need for taking up larger land parcels to build more than one building on it were the Ajmeras. Their major projects in Andheri East and West in the early 1970s were of a pioneering nature. For more and more people living in a complex of multi-storied houses was a logical and practical way forward; and useful for the builders, too.
Numbers provided security. Just as in the olden days, when the pre-historic hunters began to get tired and settle down, a village was born; and then a town. Such residential complexes by the builders were a mini-township! Jay Prakash Nagar and Vijay Nagar were the pioneers of these.
Then came Mr Krishna Morari Goenka, and his “Gokuldham and Yashodham” Projects on more than 40 Hectares [100 Acres] of land in Goregaon East, an unheard of and an undeveloped location. I can tell you from personal knowledge how builders used to laugh at him, then. Even in 1983, one had to go to Goregaon Station from there to get a packet of biscuits. But then Mr K. M. Goenka had the last laugh: today the larger the land you have to develop the better for you; and every builder worth his salt is all for it.
The next big thrust was by a Mr Siraj Lokhandwala, who around that time had pipped the Rahejas in getting a few of the choicest and well-located plots in Bandra and Khar, and who somehow got on to this very large, the largest of the permissions under the Urban Land (Ceiling and Regulation) Act, 1976. A huge chunk of 550,000 square metres of land was there for development. His business acumen lay in a nice Master Plan of broader roads being declared public roads, and getting the then Bombay Municipal Corporation to provide the drainage network and the water connections. Not to forget that the Local Electric Company, then, was always too happy to supply power connections that was its very revenue.
Mr Lokhandwala merrily developed a large number of buildings on that piece of land of Survey Number 161 of Oshiwara Village of Andheri Taluqa, of the Mumbai Suburban District. But he also had the vision to invite other builders to do so, as the reach of his personal resources was limited, but the development could be expanded by getting others to do so at the same time. Although he had never wanted to, that location is even now most commonly known as “Lokhandwala Complex”.
Finally, from doing a lone but good building here and there, the Rahejas and Hiranandani also started off with a bang in taking up larger areas for development: Mindspace in Malad and the Powai Complex of Hiranandani are examples of not just good, but perhaps, the best development of large and larger plots of land.
Now what is it that makes for builders seeking such larger plots of land to develop? Quite obviously the logistics of supervising a larger area under development within the same boundary walls, or nearby, is both time and cost saving. The engineering and the other staff required to look after the construction and completion of a one-building project can be also deployed to look after more buildings within that same complex, or others next door, or nearby. The time and the efforts of the Engineers and the Supervisors get adequately and fully utilised, without wasting too much of their precious resources in travelling between two different sites, located kilometers apart. Such movement in 2 or more different locations, dotted across the city was perhaps, acceptable in the 1980s and 1990s. But with the constant urban movement, the ever burgeoning traffic has made that not just a nightmare, but a very wasteful utilisation of invaluable time.
The same applies to the Departments of Accounts as well as Marketing, too. None of these Staff need to spend their time to travel between different projects; and which can be best utilised in monitoring this one major project, of their employer. Within the same salary and perks, they can give more and better output.
This concentration of working areas saves a huge cost of overheads, as that very fixed cost can be spread over a larger area to be constructed, whereby the fixed cost per unit of that comes down, drastically. The Overhead costs, which are now no longer a very small percentage of the total costs of the project on a per unit cost basis would become lower, much lower. Do remember, that with the demand for quality of the buildings, the supervision of constructing them, apart from using good materials, is also important, and demands good and personalised quality controls. You cannot simply leave the construction and finishing of a flat you wish to sell for an eight figure amount to unsupervised labourers. And good supervisor does not come cheap; over the years, the salaries of all staff, and even labour have been going up and up. After all, good salaries make for good savings; and these very people with good savings are also buyer of the housing units!
Similarly, the Inspection costs, too will be lower. Not only that of the builder, but also those of the Professionals like the Architects, the RCC Engineers & the HVAC and other Consultants. All the concerned people connected with the Project, will be spending all their precious time to reach just one major project, rather than dissipate that time and effort in travelling from site to site. Time saved is Time earned.
The similar will be the cost constraints of the transport of the raw materials to the same site. Instead of monitoring the movement of the transport of materials in different sites in varied locations across the city, in diverse directions, that can then be a time and fuel saver, as not only the monitoring by the builder, but even the building material suppliers should give discounts for their transport costs saved.
Another advantage in this large land area development is the option of keeping a store or godown, and even the larger of the Site Office, and the Marketing Office in just one site. Rather than build these for the different projects nearby, that piece of land which will be built last, or be left open to sky, can be utilised for a Store or a Godown for all the nearby projects, thereby saving the construction costs of building different such units, in the different sites. This also can be a real cost saver.
All such cost savers, in a very competitive atmosphere of fast rising land costs, and discerning buyers, are quite an important factor.
No wonder then, it is an area development approach that is being adopted by the bigger and wiser of the Builders. The Fortune City of Hiranandani and the Godrej City, both in Panvel are examples of this. Most builders with similar larger projects will find it expedient to acquire more lands in the surroundings of their bigger projects, or around them, rather than pick up land parcels in odd and far-flung locations, many a kilometre away.
Imagine spending three or more hours going to your project in SOBO, and then to another one in Vasai and then to the one in Panvel! You will be spending more time travelling than inspecting your projects.
Flyovers and Expressways are very much needed, but even then, traffic jams are unavoidable, as long as we don’t have the proper discipline of driving. And that will take a very, very long time to settle in. Even then, the sheer numbers of motor vehicles will outpace all seamless road links. Already our Highways are examples of an elongated Parking Lot!
Sub-cities should be satellite towns, and not suburbs of the main City, where the people living in those suburbs have to travel to the City for their work. These Sub-cities or Satellite towns should independently exist as an urban centre. Only then will the long commuting hours be avoided.
Navi Mumbai was meant to be an additional city than Mumbai. Unfortunately, somewhere down the line, though planned somewhat better than Bombay was in the late 1800s or even the 1900s, a well-planned Navi Mumbai lost its much touted independent status, and became just another ordinary suburb of Mumbai.
This is what we will need to guard against. While inter-city connectivity is important, and can never, nor should ever, be avoided, or avoidable, the diurnal and lengthy commute has to be dispensed with. Precious and irreplaceable people-hours are being lost in that.
Zafar Iqbal