Satish Magar grew up in a farmer’s family – in the city of Pune. Their village (now Magarpatta) was a very unique geographical island. Bounded on three sides by roads – and on the last by a railway line, the families have stayed together – and in harmony. Satish’s own family is a joint one – which even now stays together. There are about 25 members in the family. Satish’s late uncle has been one of his inspirations. The uncle was a politician who was an MLA and later on a Member of Parliament from Pune. But his uncle retired from politics in 1977 and passed away a couple of years later. His dad is a Civil engineering graduate from COEP, but Satish wanted to do something different – so he joined the College of Agriculture Pune after schooling at Bishops School. 

Satish calls himself an urban farmer. After Satish’s education in agriculture he decided to try his hand at farming. After a couple of years he realised that farming was not his cup of chai. His next venture was a dairy. His dairy supplied cow’s milk exclusively and was the first one which used imported milking machines from Holland. It took almost 2 years for Satish to realize that in a city like Pune it is buffalo’s milk that is more popular and not cow’s. He then moved on to a venture related to FMCG distribution. Along with a few friends, he started distribution of Parle Frooti in Pune. The launch was very successful, but Satish realised that this is not a business which is going to give him the returns that he was expecting.

It was the mid 80s by then, and urbanisation has started affecting is area. A lot of his neighbours had started selling their land to developers. Satish’s dad was a contractor, but he was not very happy with Satish’s next idea of becoming a developer because he felt it was too risky. Nevertheless, Satish went on to develop a couple of projects. But he then realized, it would be much more interesting and challenging if the entire village were to come together and jointly developed their land holding. Satish’s family being land owners of about 150 acres out of the 450 acres village land obviously had some weight to throw around. A meeting of the 120 families that comprised the village was organised in 1993. In this meeting it was decided that the villagers would not sell. Sellers were social outcasts in the village – they would spend everything that they had got, even before they received it. The social status of land sellers would therefore continue to be working as watchman and milkman even after selling of the land. There was an option to buy land about 70-80 km away near Daund, but all of them being urban farmers did not like the idea of moving out. So the families agreed to Satish’s proposal. A company was formed, where families were allotted shares in proportion to their land holding. A value of 100 Rupees per square metre was assigned for one share. By the way, today that is Rs. 4500 + now. It was also decided that the company would have no external shareholders, except for the village folk.

 
Once the approval to jointly develop the land was got, Satish started working on developing an overall plan for the land holding. He got in touch with Hafeez Contractor, whose wife is from Pune. (She was Satish’s sister’s classmate and used to stay in Saint Patrick’s town.) Hafiz suggested that space be used to make a Golf Course, surrounded by luxury Villas. Satish did not like the idea. He wanted to do something for people like him, basically the middle class – and that is how the idea of a township was born.

A master plan was made and the government was approached. They faced a lot of resistance from the district town planning people, who thought that planning is best done by government, not by the private sector. What helped Satish was a good Chief minister at the time, Sharad Pawar and also the then chief secretary of Maharashtra, Mr. Joseph. Am sure his late uncle’s influence and contacts were also of help. The duo were progressive and accepted Satish’s idea – treating it as a guinea pig for private townships. It still took 7 years and 3 more CMs for the permissions to come. An adept politician, Satish also got an approval from Balasaheb Thakeray for his farmer owned township project – Magarpatta City.

Now that the government permissions had come, it was time to run after financing. Soli Dastur, a Chartered Accountant and lawyer, did all the documentation. Financial Institutions were not ready to invest, in spite of all this amazing work done by Soli. Satish managed to set up an appointment with Deepak Parekh of HDFC. He sought 100 crore rupees from Deepak, who in turn advised him that you start small and later on grow big. HDFC sanctioned 2 crore rupees to Satish. By this time it was Dec 1999, and the market had turned recessionary. But the Frooti launch had taught Satish the importance of marketing during lean times. The paucity of funds, thanks to HDFC’s tight fist, also helped in keeping the overheads very much in control.

Around that time Satish, had a meeting with Vijay Bhatkar who was running the C DAC center at Pune University. Vijay influenced him to start thinking about IT t as a part of Pune’s future. Later on Satish was part of a MCCI delegation that visited San Jose. He looked around at the buildings there and saw buildings very much like the ones that he had built, maybe a few structural changes here and there. He realised that he could make this kind of infrastructure back in Pune. So the master-plan of Magarpatta was created with such IT parks, surrounding a central park and residences clustered towards the periphery. Each of these buildings had a plate area of 44000 square feet. The main roads in the Magarpatta master plan had a width of 150 feet. Pune Municipal Corporation initially refused to sanction this plan, afraid that there would be encroachments on these huge roads. Satish promised to start by first building the boundary walls along the roads. PMC reluctantly agreed. He mentions of a back up plan – in case the IT stuff did not work out. Professor Majumdar of Symbiosis would be invited to start his University over there!

One of the hallmarks of Satish is his management style. He is a stickler for rules. He maintains strict working hours of 9 to 6. There are heavy fines for people who do not follow the rules at Magarpatta. And this is how the corporation managers to ensure that its 70000 residents a peaceful life. 35 tons of garbage are processed everyday at Magarpatta city – with the Magarpatta Corporation having to subsidize this by a meager 2 lakhs per month. Rest of the funds are raised from selling of recycled stuff, and the gas generated from the wet garbage. Magarpatta is a zero waste township. He believes that PNC can use his model to run their entire garbage ecosystem, but vested interests involved in transportation of garbage, ensure that this model is not adopted. Another interesting facet of Magarpatta city is that the internal power distribution losses are at less than 1 %.

And what is Satish’s assessment about Pune’s realty future? He looks forward to more IT companies and thereby more migration into Pune. He is already onto his second venture – Nanded city, which is owned by the local farmers using a similar model. And yes, he is building more IT parks over there!