Auctioneers expect to raise Rs 6,500 crore by selling 4,700 acres of Sahara land

In what could be India’s biggest land sale, over 4,700 acres owned by the Sahara Group across 14 Indian states have been put on the block by HDFC Realty and SBI Capital Markets. As the sale goes through, the deal is expected be worth Rs 6,500 crore. However, the fact that the properties have huge chunks of agricultural land located in rural areas could affect the amount of the deal.

As per Sahara, it has a total land bank of 33,633 acres out of which the Aamby Valley City located near Lonavala accounts for 10,600 acres. Similarly, about 1,000 acres is spread across various towns and cities of Uttar Pradesh, the capital of which houses the company headquarters.

It was early this month that the honourable Supreme Court had released Sahara chief Subrata Roy, who has been in Tihar Jail since March 2014, and group director Ashok Roy Choudhary on a parole for four weeks. It was then that the court had said that Sahara could sell its properties to raise Rs 5,000 crore as a bank guarantee and another Rs 5,000 crore to get bail.

After this order, the market regulator authority Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) had mandated that HDFC Realty and SBI Capital Markets auction 60 Sahara properties across the country.


The locations of these lands are as follows: Ujjain and Indore in Madhya Pradesh, Ajmer in Rajasthan, Aligarh, Bahraich, Bareilly, Muzaffarnagar, Lucknow, Noida in UP, Guwahati in Assam, Salem in Tamil Nadu, and Porbander and Baroda in Gujarat.

Image source