Knight Frank to monetise railway land Hyderabad, Sept 12 (INN): The Rail Land Development Authority has partnered with Knight Frank India to undertake it's initiative of monetizing unused railway land parcels in 53 locations across the South and West of India.
The Knight Frank India will be responsible for conducting site visits, coordinating collaterals, 'Expression of Interest' from developers, retailers and hoteliers, as well as managing the bid process.
Speaking about the collaboration RLDA spokesperson said, 'We are engaged in the development of Land/Air Space entrusted to the Authority to generate non-tariff revenue and create assets for Indian Railways.
In this context, we have opened bids for Gujarat and in a process of opening bids for Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra among the others. We concluded the pre-bid meeting at Chennai last month and have good response from developers and hoteliers in the state.'
Gulam Zia, Executive Director- Advisory, Retail & Hospitality, Knight Frank India said, 'With the ultimate aim of making rail journey more comfortable and enjoyable, Knight Frank has joined hands with RLDA.
We formally believe the basic needs of rail 'yatris' can be handled better with efforts from all stake-holders. A PPP model is the best way to handle the situation. We have approached various service providers and vendors like banks, hoteliers, F&B sector, pharma retaliers etc, and have found them all very excited about the MFCs as a unique opportunity to directly connect to their consumers.'
'This is a novel step based being taken by the railways to create customer utilities by efficient utilization of existing resources by using PPP model without any burden on their balance sheet. This will go a long way in creation of other similar public assets in the near future,' Saurabh Mehrotra, Director - Advisory added.
News Posted: 12 September, 2013
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