120 farmers pooled land to create this 400-acre cyber city

The biggest stakeholder is 45-year-old Satish Magar, also MD of Magarpatta Township Development and Construction, whose family contributed 40 per cent of the land. ‘‘Once the families owned tractors and grew vegetables and sugarcane. Now they travel in Qualises and Lancers, file income-tax returns, send their children to the ICSE, English-medium school on campus. It gives them a sense of pride that they are entrepreneurs,’’ says Satish.

At least one from each family has been trained to do some work related to developing the township. So while Sambhaji Magar quit his job at Bharat Forge to take charge of the electrical work on campus, another gave up his law practice to become a contractor. Narendra Magar resigned from Telco in Pimpri-Chinchwad and now has the entire painting contract for the project’s exteriors and interiors. ‘‘I live in Hadapsar gaon, but will shift inside Magarpatta city next year,’’ says Narendra.

Satish Magar and the others started with a loan of Rs 2 crore from HDFC in 2000. They first built the compound wall, roads and gardens, planted trees (20,000) and then began construction. Now, Tower 1, which has 300,000 sq ft of office space, is full; Tower II will be operational in three months and is totally leased out; Tower III too will be ready by June. ‘‘By 2005 we should have built six towers, creating 20 lakh sq ft of space. On an average, we build 40,000 sq ft, which is one floor, every 12 days,’’ says Magar.

The cost of the investment so far? Rs 450 crore. ‘‘The rent pays for the debt,’’ he adds.

The Magar families don’t want to stop at this. The ultimate plan is to build six more towers—‘‘We want to create a 4-million-sq-ft software technology park because with Bangalore/Noida/Mumbai getting saturated, Pune will be the preferred IT destination and we want to be ready’’—28 neighbourhoods of flats, studio apartments, row houses, of which seven are ready and more than 60 per cent occupied and the rest are under construction; 28 block gardens, the 25-acre centrepiece—Aditi Garden—has already been built; health clubs; jogging tracks; hospital etc.

‘‘We would have lost the land and suffered unplanned growth like many other parts of the city. The government would have given us compensation and we would have frittered the money away. Now, we have built something for the next generation,’’ says Satish, whose two daughters are already working part-time in the project.

An agriculture graduate, Satish says his biggest asset was inexperience. Once the paperwork was done and the government convinced that a township could be built, Magar and his team travelled abroad. To see township projects firsthand. They finally adopted the ‘‘walk to work’’ concept they saw in San Jose-Santa Clara (Silicon Valley), adding the ‘‘walk to school’’ idea as well.

If short of inspiration, Satish looks to his uncle Annasaheb Magar, who established a new township near Pune in the ’50s, now the hub of manufacturing Pimpri-Chinchwad, where auto majors from DaimlerChrysler to Tata Motors are located. In 1975, Annasaheb built the Gultekdi wholesale market off Pune-Satara Road too, long before Pune thought it needed it.