Alfred Ford and the Snow Gamble

But Ford was in India earlier this month to seal an even more ambitious project. He plans to bring in foreign investment worth $510 million to build a ski village resort in Himachal Pradesh. His privately-held company ABF International, in which Ford and a consortium of investors have stakes, has signed an MoU with the Congress-led Himachal government for a ski resort capable of ‘‘hosting Winter Olympics’’ in the Manali valley.

Expected to come up above Shuru village, 4 km from Manali town, Ford is gambling that foreign tourists will come to the hill state lured by the grandeur of Pir Panjal’s pencil-peak range and the high-altitude treeless meadow which, according to adventure sports experts, sees good snowfall 200 days of the year. The government has earmarked 50 acres between Allaina Nala and Pukhnoj Nala—the area’s main streams—in a 99-year lease to develop the resort.

Our inbound tourist flow currently stands at an embarrassing 3.2 million and Ford clearly sees the potential for growth. The global winter sport market is roughly over $20 billion; the US alone has 500 ski village resorts, while Japan has 43 and China, 12.

“India can currently support six ski resorts in the country, but Manali has the advantage of well-maintained approach roads as well as an airport,” says John Sims, managing director of the Himalayan Ski Village, the company set up to execute the project.

A Krishna devotee like his long-time friend Ford, Sims once ran boutique hotels on the Florida seafront before selling out to Hyatt International.

Sims, who is now a hotel consultant and runs an export business in India, is upbeat. The scramble for a share of the ice-pie has already begun, he says. Nearly five equity investors and venture funds want to be part of the project and hotel brands like Oberoi, Ananda Resorts and even Mandarin, which is yet to make a formal entry into the country, want to set up hotels in the area.

At his temporary two-room Himalayan Ski Village office in New Delhi’s Chattarpur area, Sims says the investments will arrive in three tranches of $155 million, $185 million and $180 million each. “It will be made according to how quickly the market absorbs the product,” he says.

But how serious is Ford about the project? Can he withstand the pulls and pressures of India’s sparring bureaucratic network? Three years after a grand announcement, his much-hyped $10 million Vedic Planetarium in Mayapur in West Bengal’s Nadia district is yet to get off the ground. Ford, who professes a love for the “art” of car-making but not necessarily the “nuts and bolts” of it, is an avid art collector and says that he chose to stay out of the family’s automobile business because ‘‘it’s engrossing in time and many in the family are interested in it anyway’’.

Ford knows it’s going to take more than an MoU to build the skier’s paradise. ‘‘There’s a general suspicion among the local authorities, which needs to be overcome,’’ is all he will say.

But away from home, in the charmed circles of Delhi and Kolkata, there are perks to having a surname like Ford. At New Delhi’s Taj Mansingh, he was upgraded to a suite when he asked for a regular room. Since the announcement of the Manali project, Ford has been swamped with phone calls. The Orissa government wants him to invest in the state. So does the Uttar Pradesh government. On his previous trip to India a few months ago, Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh met him at a New Delhi hotel to convince him to invest in Kurukshetra, the mythological battleground of the Kauravas and Pandavas.

Propelled by “Indian industrialists”, Ford is now also taking a special interest in reviving Vrindavan and other brajs to build a cohesive religious tourism circuit. “India is the mother country of all living beings at a spiritual level,” he says.

But unlike in the US, where he leads a private life with Sharmila—his Indian wife of 20 years—and two daughters, the Indian experience is bound to be a roller coaster ride.

In their Florida Keys coastal home, the Ford household is up before sunrise, at 4.30 am, to meditate and chant mantras before the children go to school. “I usually look into my business later in the day but there is no hurry,” says Ford. He has been a non-smoking teetotaller and vegetarian since he came into contact with Iskcon founder Swami Prabhupada Bhaktivedanta in 1975. Sharmila is a PhD in biochemistry from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where they met and after a brief long-distance courtship were married in 1984.

Better known as Ambarish Das in the Iskcon circle and described as a “Krishna addict” by some, Ford’s recent India visit was a business as well as a personal one. A few days ago, Ford was in Mayapur to scatter the ashes of his mother, Josephine Claye Ford, who died on June 1 this year. Ford has since been sorting out her $100 million art collection, including works of Picasso and Matisse, which has been bequeathed to a Detroit museum. While at Mayapur, he also managed to get an “in-principle approval” to get the planetarium project moving, a pyrrhic victory of sorts.

Will his ski resort face similar delays? Political rumblings are already being heard in the Opposition camps. Prem Kumar Dhumal, former chief minister and BJP leader in the Vidhan Sabha, describes the deal as yet another “sell-out” by the Virbhadra Singh government. ‘‘It is even worse than the sell-out to the Oberois who now run Wildflower Hall in Shimla. The highest bidder was rejected to sell the property for just Rs 7.5 crore,’’ he alleges. Dhumal insists that global tenders should be floated for the proposed resort instead of an exclusive agreement with one business party.

While Dhumal did not elaborate on how villagers would be at risk, the state tourism minister GS Bali brushed aside the allegations and said the government has thoroughly assessed the environment report prepared by the Dehradun-based Indian Institute of Forest Research.

The project, expected to begin next year, will take three years to complete and is expected to create a minimum of 300 permanent jobs. Besides, grazing and timber distribution rights—a key concern for Rajesh Joshi, a resident of Sajala village in the upper reaches—will remain untouched, says Sims. Joshi says he has no objection to the project as long as the ancestral land of his family remains undisturbed. “In winter, anyway the place is covered by snow,” he says.

And far from the negotiating table, Chandan, a shopkeeper in Manali town, is already counting pennies. “It will help us cut prices of goods as Manali will become a wholesale market for the entire valley.”

(With inputs from Suresh Khatta/Shimla and Sanjay Dutta/Manali)