NTC to start Mumbai land sale via e-auctioning

The government-owned National Textiles Corporation (NTC) will tomorrow start e-auctioning about 11 acres of surplus land at prime location Worli in Mumbai, with expectations of garnering more than Rs 1,000 crore.

NTC intends to use the proceeds to part-finance its Rs 9,102-crore expansion, diversification and modernisation programme for its mills and retail network.

Textiles Minister Dayanidhi Maran will inaugurate the e-auction for the land vacated by two of the closed mills -- Bharat Textile Mills and Podar Textile Mills -- from here.

While Bharat Textiles Mill has 8.38 acres of land, the other has the remaining 2.39 acres.

NTC has nine mills located at Prabhadevi, Worli and Lower Parel in Mumbai. The total area of these mills comes to nearly 60 acres. It had earlier said that all mill lands would be sold in phases within the current fiscal.

The price of land in these areas of the financial capital ranges between Rs 80 crore and Rs 100 crore per acre, an analyst said.

Going by a previous experience of the firm, the mill land might fetch NTC even more. In 2005, a NTC mill plot at Worli was sold for 274 per cent over and above the reserve price.

In the biggest-ever land deal in the country, a 6.1 crore plot of land in Central Mumbai was recently sold for Rs 4,053 crore. A subsidiary of Mumbai-based Lodha Developers bought it from the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority.

NTC originally had 119 mills, out of which 77 were closed under the Industrial Disputes Act. While two were handed over to the Pondicherry government, five are being revived through joint ventures with Pantaloons, Alok Industries and Bhaskar Industries.