Several on-site labourers in the city want to take special trains being run to transport workers back home. The rising number of COVID-19 cases in the city has caused anxiety among them.
Experts say that the lockdown and its aftermath will further quicken the consolidation in the real estate sector, which has been taking place since 2012, with more small players going out of the business and bigger, branded players dominating the market.
Nivedita Mookerji goes in search of the elusive war room to track and respond to the coronavirus threat.
'High-value homes are designed and built on slum lands and slums are given residue. They do not have access to free air and live in close proximity of others.'
A single format and simpler, uniform rules would have kept the service going. In other parts of the world including in the US, managing demand and capacities along with ensuring preventive measures were an issue, but there was hardly any administrative hurdle anywhere.
CREDAI-MCHI, a body of developers in Mumbai, has pegged the drop in sales booking at around 80 per cent in the February-March period this year. This is the second highest fall in residential sales in the past five years, after Q1, 2017, when the decline, due to the note ban, was 37 per cent.
In the last one week several companies have had to face the hurdle of making a distinction between what's essential and what's not. To help them the government has now clarified that grocery would include hygiene products such as hand wash, soaps, disinfectants, body wash, shampoo, surface cleaners, detergents, tissue paper, toothpaste, oral care, sanitary pads, diapers, chargers and battery cells, etc.
Changing with the times and in compliance with social distancing norms, customers are now picking up their parcels, speed posts and registered letters within the city themselves after they are informed on phone.
The analyst said since servicing of principal and interest on loans will beome challenging for mall operatos in the next couple of months.
Retailers and multiplex operators want mall owners to either forgo rent for the period of the shutdown or lower rent in the event the mall is open but footfalls are low.
Employees asked to work from home... cancelled travel plans... curtailed meetings... Caution and precaution dominate Corporate India's response to Covid-19.
For 80 years, news and views aired on BBC Hindi reached audiences in the remotest parts of the country. For millions of its followers, the signature line -'yeh BBC hai (this is BBC)' -- has been like a morning alarm, and the bulletins a vital link between India and the world. That link, which began when there was no mobile phone or internet, is about to break as the radio service will fall silent after January 31. And for many living in smaller towns and in rural areas, life won't be the same again, writes Nivedita Mookerji.
Experts feel that mall owners anticipate an increase in costs to the tune of 15-20 per cent annually, prompting a mixed response to the '24 hours' initiative. A mall owner said while the policy is good in spirit, implementing it would be a challenge as night shopping or eating out wasn't a habit in Mumbai yet.
Almost all the big mall developers/investors - such as Raheja-owned Inorbit Malls, Xander-APG joint venture Virtuous Retail South Asia (VRSA), property developer Prestige Estates Projects, and Blackstone-owned Nexus Malls - are looking to double their space in a year or two.
CPPIB, which started investing in the country in 2009, has invested in Kotak Mahindra Bank, L&T Infrastructure Development Projects, online education firm Byju's, energy company ReNew Power, logistics firm Delhivery, among others.
'After that, volumes and prices would move up.'
Whether it is DLF in the National Capital Region, or Godrej Properties and Oberoi Realty in Mumbai or Sunteck Realty, Prestige Estates and Sobha Realty in Bengaluru, most top players have launched or lined up a slew of new project launches during this season.
Analysts say that PMC Bank case is only going to make matters worse for HDIL and the Wadhawans.
While Waryam Singh was a non-executive director at HDIL, he is listed as one of the promoters of the company and had relations, including shareholding, with several other entities controlled by the Wadhawans, the HDIL founders.
Still, the earliest India will get to experience Apple online will be early 2020 and the company's first fully-owned signature store should be up around 2022 -- almost two decades after it had opened its first store worldwide, writes Nivedita Mookerji.