Fairwood Group, a project management firm in the mobility, energy and urbanisation sectors, has tied up with Chinese technical university, Tongji, to bid for building new cities, including a media city in Andhra Pradesh.

“The media city, with 2,000 acres in the first phase, would include media and production houses from Bollywood and Hollywood,” Ranbir Saran Das, Vice-Chairman and Managing Director, Fairwood Group, told BusinessLine .

AP project The consortium is now focussing on “configuring” the project in Andhra Pradesh, which will cost about $15-16 billion. The Chinese firms have lot of funds but have few projects to invest in, he added.

Tongji University, which is like IITs in China, according to Das, has tie-ups with 160 commercial companies, mostly State-owned, and has participated in projects, including the Maglev trains. Many of these firms are Fortune 500 companies, including Chinese Railways, China Hub, CCCI and China Construction, he added.

The consortium has funds to take the projects on construction finance on build-operate-transfer basis. Tongji Fairwood (TF) consortium is developing a city — Batumi — in Georgia, and has also developed new cities in China, Russia and Vietnam.

TF plans to create a new city with funding, expertise, design, execute and operate it as well. This can be done for large land owners — government or private.

Fairwood Group has also been trying to implement a pod car project, a personal rapid transport system project in almost 37-38 cities in India. The most recent project was the one in Dehradun, where the project had been tendered and approved by the State Cabinet and is in the procurement stage.

For past seven-eight years now, the company has also tried to take up projects in Amritsar and Gurgaon. The Amritsar project was cancelled as the new government during negotiations did not agree on the tariff norms for the pod car project.

“When governments change, you don’t know who to talk to. The newcomers are always suspicious of what the previous ones have done,” said Das. The biggest risk that you find in starting and completing a project is government not knowing how to approve, compare such projects with other transportation projects, said Das, whose company is also bidding for National Highway Authority of India’s project to connect Gurgaon with Manesar.

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