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The story of great Indian mall boom started from the emergence of Gurgaon, a sleepy little suburb of Delhi. In a development that surprised many town planners, Gurgaon transformed itself overnight by first housing the headquarters of many multinational corporations and banks, and then calling itself the "shopping-mall capital of India".
Each mall in Gurgaon is about 300,000 square feet in size, with every leading retailer, or, to use a trade parlance, "anchor", occupying anything between 60,000-80,000 square feet.

It is not just the north of the country that is seeing a furious construction of malls. Visakhapatnam, a fast-growing city in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, is witnessing a huge demand for shopping malls. The biggest of them, CMR Shopping Mall, occupies 60,000 square feet over five floors. The throngs of buyers who visit the mall are working class and office employees of the numerous public and private sector outfits that are based in Visakhapatnam.

Similarly, Ahmedabad in western India is slowly becoming a magnet for shopping malls. More than half a dozen malls have sprung up in Ahmedabad, known as a fading city of dying textile mills until a few years back. The biggest of them, aptly called Super Mall, occupies a gargantuan 90,000 square feet and has 200 shops in its folds.

But the biggest mall-construction activity in India is taking place, as expected, in Mumbai, the country's financial and business capital. In all, 25 malls are under construction, each measuring anything between 90,000 and 600,000 square feet. A hefty Rs. 4 billion (US $87 million) is being pumped into these projects by 20 investors. About a dozen malls are already up and running in the up-market south side of the city, as well as the downmarket distant suburbs.

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* Contributed by: -
Deepak Verma (Campus Associate),
PGD-GMT from National Institute of Fashion Technology,
Currently persuing PGDBM from Welingakr Institute of Management, Mumbai.