Agra offers to lease land for multiplexes

Of late, Agra has been witnessing a major change in its landscape, with dozens of multi-storied shopping malls and complexes coming up all over the town in the past one year.

This indicates a possible change in the shopping behaviour of the fast-growing urban population. The city was recently declared the 27th metropolitan city of the country.

Market analysts, however, believe that as most of the malls are coming up at a distance of 4-5 km outside the main township area, they could not experience much foot traffic, unless a major part of the city's population decided to move into the residential colonies being developed in the vicinity of these malls.

Sensing the need among the builders for prime land inside the city and the inability of the Agra Development Authority to provide this land, the Agra Cantonment Board, which holds almost 30 per cent of the total land available in Agra, with most of the land lying largely underutilised in the form of disused bunglows and open grounds located deep within the posh areas of the city, has decided to lease out this open land to builders who are interested in setting up malls or complexes.

Talking to Business Standard, Rakesh Mittal, executive officer, Agra Cantonment said that initially, the board had offered a 1.079 acres piece of land located on the Mahatma Gandhi Road in the middle of the town to private builders who were interested in developing a shopping mall on that land.

He said that as the land in a cantonment area was in "" effect, military land, the Board shall offer this land on a specific lease term to the builders under an agreement that could be revoked in case the land was required by the Ministry of Defence in national interest or after the expiry of the lease term, which could be anywhere between 60-90 years, after which, the immovable property constructed on the land would become the property of the Cantonment Board.

Besides, he said, the board was also contemplating to allow reputed healthcare companies to setup a multistoreyed hospital building inside the cantonment general hospital for providing specialized healthcare services in the fields of medicine, pediatrics, eye, dental, obstetrics and orthopedics to the people residing in the Agra cantonment.