With Gurgaon, Sonepat, Faridabad and Panchkula humming with commercial and residential building activities, the real estate emerged as the most favourite sector for investors in Haryana in 2010, an Assocham study said.
Of the total investment of Rs 4.3 lakh crore under implementation, real estate accounted for Rs 2.4 lakh crore, it said.
“Real estate industry got the lion's share of 56 per cent of the total live investments,” the industry body said in its strategy paper on investment in the state.
It said Rs 2.4 lakh crore were invested in major cities such as Gurgaon, Manesar and Faridabad.
“Bulk of investments were in Gurgaon, which is a hub of 500 companies with their back end operations here,” Chairman of Assocham's northern region development council, Mr Lalit Khaitan, said.
Besides Gurgaon, private builders are active in developing and selling real estate in the NCR towns of Sonepat, Faridabad and Bahadurgarh. Panchkula near Chandigarh is also witnessing real estate boom.
Mr Khaitan said the state government needed to come up with policies keeping in mind issues such as sanitation, environment and civic maintenance, so that the investments remained attractive in the long run.
Services and electricity were the other destinations of investment, it said. “Services and electricity attracted 25.2 and 13.5 per cent investment, respectively,” the paper said. The overall investments grew by 20.3 per cent over last year's Rs 3.5 lakh crore, it added.
Mr Khaitan said the major problem in the growth of the state was power. He said: “Power and land acquisition are among major impediments. Acquisition of land should be between buyer and seller. The land must be sold at market price and it should not be an agricultural land”.