Hot spot in India with prices from €38,000

An Irish-Indian partnership is offering investors a chance to be part of the economic boom in India. Frances O'Rourkereports

Priests in saffron tunics sit in a square around bowls of grains, chanting, before they light a fire. Today is the day for "Bhoomi Pujan" or land worship, a ritual to ensure that all will go well with an Irish-Indian property development that's being launched today on a dusty building site 250km north of Delhi in India.

It's not the usual property launch (Ireland gave up blessing factory openings and the like around 30 years ago and launches now are more likely to feature models and champagne). Here a man dressed in a colourful horse costume prances in front, welcoming us to the building site; sari-clad girls drape garlands about our necks.

Kieran Murphy, a cheerful Dubliner who is MD of Kuvera Properties, settles down on the ground beside the priests, as does his Indian partner, pony-tailed developer Vinay Bansal of VG Buildtech.

Elsewhere on the large sun-drenched site, a circus-cum-funfair is going on: a play about star-crossed lovers, starring a Freddie Mercury lookalike, is acted out with the help of loud music and a camel; a strongman picks up a steel girder with his teeth; there's kite flying, a puppet show, food.

India, the second fastest growing economy in the world after China, is a hot spot which has been attracting the attention of a number of Irish developers and agents - Larionovo had a good response earlier this year when it launched properties near Mumbai and in Goa. Property prices have reportedly risen by 70 per cent in the past two years.

Special Economic Zones (SEZ)like Bangalore, the most famous, drive this development - and one of the newest is in Rudrapur, a dusty village 250kms north of Delhi, where the apartments on offer off plans to Irish investors are being built.

They are emphatically not holiday homes, but housing for the thousands of Indian managers and supervisors who will soon be coming to work here. And they are, say Kuvera and VG Buildtech a good investment opportunity.

But how did Kuvera, an Irish property investment company specialising in UK property, find itself building homes for Indians in remote Rudrapur?

It comes down to a love story between Radhika Jha, an Indian woman living in Dublin, and John Bent, who works for Kuvera. Earlier this year he told Kieran Murphy about a business his father-in-law, Dr Ajit Jha, in Delhi was involved in. Several meetings later, a deal was done that led some six months on to the festive November foundation-stone laying.

About 600 apartments on two sites close to the industrial estate are being offered to Irish investors at prices starting from €38,000 off-plans. Ranging in size up to 153sq m (1,650sq ft), the high spec two-bedroom, two-en suite, two-balcony units which will be set in landscaped grounds, can be bought freehold or leased.

Kuvera is offering a two-year rental guarantee at 5 per cent per annum net, and guarantees to buy back the property on completion for the purchase price (to reassure investors who might want to get out at that stage). Murphy has already sold about 120 of the apartments off-plans to Irish investors, and has a series of property seminars in Dublin, Cork and Galway starting this Sunday in Dublin.

Kuvera is also targeting the Indian community: last week, just off a flight from Delhi, he headed for a Kuvera-sponsored Diwali (the Hindu festival of light) get-together in Dublin.

Murphy was persuaded of the potential of this development by the sheer ambition of the Rudrapur SEZ. Driving around the giant 4,200-acre industrial estate where companies like Nestlé have already built factories gives some notion of the scale of development in what up to now has been a poor farming area.

Major tax concessions offered to Indian and foreign manufacturers since 2003 have attracted 465 companies so far, including India's largest car company, Tata, which is building a plant on a 1,000-acre site.

The contrast between the eerily quiet estate, with gleaming white buildings and wide paved streets, and the world around it - roadside shacks, dusty overcrowded villages, roads crammed with every kind of vehicle from oxcarts to the occasional Merc - says it all about the rapidly changing face of India.

[ www.kuvera-india.com ]

Rudrapur facts

• Population of 125,000

• 50,000 workers to be employed on new 4,000-acre industrial estate by December 2008

• 10,000 homes to be built by January 2009 by nine developers (including Kuvera)

• Land prices doubled in past year, expected to double again. Kuvera hopes for capital appreciation of at least 50 per cent

• Airport being upgraded by end 2008; eight-lane highway from Delhi (250km away) being built