Tanaji Malusare City (TMC), spread over 100 acres, is coming up at Karjat, about 60 km west of Pune, consisting of no less than 5,000 homes of 160, 225, 325 and 400 sq ft carpet areas, costing Rs 2 lakhs, Rs 3 lakhs, Rs 5 lakhs and Rs 7 lakhs respectively. TMC, promoted by Matheral Realty, claims its India’s first Rs 800-crore mass social housing project.

Pravin Banavalikar, CEO of TMC, has said the company will offer 6,000 apartments to MMRDA free of cost in exchange for additional 4 FSI granted to it instead of the earlier 5 FSI and for creating off site infrastructure for the township. The additional FSI will allow TMC to construct 12,000 more homes in addition to the original 3,000 already sold to customers.

TMC’s first sold-out project indicated a huge unmet demand in the market for affordable housing. It was first launched last September offering 3,000 homes in Karjat in the Rs 3 lakh to Rs 7 lakh price range in the first phase.The company received a whopping response with 66,000 applications from Mumbai and thousands of calls from Pune for homes, which will be completed by the end of 2009.

“This terrific response also revealed to us that housing in the Rs 20 lakh to Rs 40 lakh is for the upper middle class and it cannot be called affordable housing and that even Rs 3 lakh was not affordable to a large section of the population,” Banavalikar asserts. Therefore, the company brought down the price to Rs 2 lakh to cover more people at the bottom of the pyramid.