Royal India Raj. Building India for the new millennium.
Chairman Manoj C. Benjamin in an extended Q&A with Editor-in-Chief Prashant Tewari — on the BRIC decade, India's 27-million-home shortage, the integrated-township opportunity, and the reforms needed for the next 20 years of growth.
Manoj C. Benjamin — Chairman of Royal Indian Raj International Corporation (RIRIC), Vancouver — sits down with Opinion Express Editor-in-Chief Prashant Tewari for the magazine's March 2010 cover-story special on India's top cities. A pioneer among the first approved FDIs into the Indian nation, and ranked #21 among Business & Economy's top-100 most influential people of 2007, Benjamin sets out RIRIC's multi-billion-dollar master-planned township program and the case for a New India.
$10B, 12–15 years
RIRIC's projected capital injection into integrated Royal Garden Cities and Royal Garden Villas & Resorts across India.
27M-home shortage
India's housing deficit as of 2010, with population adding 180M every decade — 3–5M new homes needed annually.
First FDI in townships
The first company in the nation to secure FIPB sanction under the Integrated Township category (2005).
“We see the Royal Indian Raj – Integrated township format as a key driver of future housing supply and as a catalyst for the much-needed infrastructure investments in the rapid urbanization of India.”
“India is truly emerging as the quiet lion about to roar. Benjamin's drive and vision is to create an economic and technological connection between East and West.”
“Progress can easily be misconstrued by the developing nature of rules and regulations in the nascent Indian Realty sector — and forces not understanding the long gestation times, our anti-corruption policy and the complexities such large endeavors require in India.”
In conversation — selected excerpts.
You had rightly predicted doom for the West and boom for the East in 2005 — was it a guess or a well thought-off statement?
My statements were based on demographic expectations that India and China, with their vast markets and domestic markets, had the weight and dynamism to transform the 21st-century global economy. The closest parallel to their emergence is the saga of 19th-century America — a huge continental economy with a young, driven workforce that grabbed the lead in agriculture, apparel and the high technologies of that era. Now the pendulum is swinging back to the East — and with it a need to transform the national physical and economic infrastructure over here.
With slowdowns worldwide, will RIRIC diversify beyond real estate?
The slowdown in the real estate sector in India will be temporary as natural population growth fuels demand along with the huge housing shortage. Our focus remains national Urban Infrastructure and Housing with township development at the forefront — bringing greater integrated focus in green self-sustainability, bio-degradable and environmental technologies, water supply, waste-to-energy generation, and water and sewage treatment. We are also developing greater depth in pre-fab construction, road building and recycling.
Vision 2020 — the key points as you see them?
India remains a country with huge growth possibilities and can close in on China by building on its democratic legacy — replicating China's ability to mobilize workers and capital and to lay down the nation's physical and economic infrastructure. It calls for special economic zones, better urban infrastructure and housing, policy stability, labor reforms, a strong legal environment, streamlined bureaucracy and the elimination of corruption. That will bring larger FDI flows and finance the large-scale growth the nation is capable of.
Opinion Express's March 2010 issue — Slicker Cities: India's Top-20 — profiles the twenty urban centres shaping India's next decade. The RIRIC cover-story feature anchors the issue's international perspective on how integrated townships and FDI can accelerate that transformation.