•Shekhar Gupta: Do you look at your stock price?

I do. I am concerned because I want investors’ stock prices to go up.

•Anandita Singh Mankotia: How do you have villages co-existing with townships in DLF, Gurgaon? Roads have tractors and BMWs and we don’t know where to park.

Town planning is archaic because you cannot have an area of affluence as an island in poverty. It’s wrong. Around the village there should be a belt where there are gardens and schools as a buffer zone between the affluent areas and the village. These are town-planning issues.

•Mahima Kaul: What is your view of the Dharavi redevelopment project?

You really need a forward-looking plan. There has to be a blend of legislation with private sector enterprise. Legislation has to be such that they make a compulsory announcement that this area is now coming under redevelopment. Having done that, they then tell the private sector—whoever they select through competitive bidding, etc—to clear up the area and provide rehabilitation facilities. Do not allow the development of the entire area until the successful rehabilitation of slum dwellers. Urban planning has to be done keeping in mind the next 100 years. Look at Chandigarh.

•Sanjay Singh: Between 2002-07, roughly the period during which the boom lasted, developers launched a number of projects. A single developer had 70-80 projects, most of the them high-end ones. Was there sufficient demand for these projects?

This is entrepreneurship. Once you’re an entrepreneur, it presupposes initiative. The degree to which entrepreneurs are encouraged to take a risk will be a measure of the government’s success. It’s happening all over the world. When we started the mall business, we were ahead of the pack by 10-15 years. After that, there was a mall mania. Everyone knows that only 30-40 per cent of malls will survive. So what happens to the rest? They become storage space—warehousing as it’s called in America. At the end of the day, unless a shopkeeper makes money he cannot pay rentals. If he cannot pay rentals, he will leave and the mall will fail. This is the crux of entrepreneurship: the one who fails will learn a sharp lesson and not make the same mistake again. It should not be discouraged, it is the essence of development.

... contd.