On a warm October afternoon in Mumbai last year, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis was at his cheerful best as he received a trade delegation led by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Welcoming them, Fadnavis unveiled plans for one of his most ambitious projects yet—the Third Mumbai, a new city bigger than the original and seamlessly connected to it. A while earlier, Fadnavis had spoken about the idea as he inaugurated the Worli office of international financial giant Goldman Sachs.
Bureaucrats and close aides of Fadnavis shared with THE WEEK details of the chief minister’s plans for the Third Mumbai, which will be an entirely new city built from the ground up with global universities, world-class hospitals, mega business districts, global capability centres, data centre parks and modern infrastructure. A close aide of Fadnavis said that the Third Mumbai, which will be located in Raigad district, will be an international city developed within the influence area of the recently opened Navi Mumbai International Airport.
“Third Mumbai is a brilliant idea, and it will bring transformational change to Mumbai,” said Pankaj Joshi, eminent urban planner and principal director of Urban Centre Mumbai. “However, three things need to be ensured. It should have a mass rapid transport system like Mumbai’s suburban railway network. A metro will not work because it is expensive. Second, Third Mumbai requires mixed use planning, which was done in Beijing and Shanghai when those cities expanded. People should live closer to the work place. Third, the new city should have the best of amenities and utilities. Bringing land into urban domain is always good idea if it is backed by detailed and solid planning. If people living in Third Mumbai can reach south Mumbai in 40-45 minutes then it will be a success.”
Mumbai itself is undergoing a sweeping infrastructure upgrade. The British built the working man’s capital of India linking seven islands. It gained prominence when England’s textile hub Manchester had to depend on Indian cotton after the civil war in the US impacted cotton imports from that country.
Bharat Gothoskar, a heritage evangelist who runs the Khaki Tours heritage walks in Mumbai, said that emergence of Mumbai as a busy seaport started in the 1860s during the cotton crisis. “The railways had started operations just a decade before the US civil war, and the cotton growing regions of Gujarat and Vidarbha were connected with railway lines which took the goods to Bombay,” he said. “The Calcutta port was equally busy but what made Bombay the busiest port was the opening of the Suez canal. Thus Bombay port became closer than the Calcutta port for trade operations and it eventually became the busiest seaport in India.”
Bombay: The Cities Within, a popular book by historians Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra, talks about Lowjee Nusserwanjee Wadia, who came to Mumbai in 1735 from Surat and laid the foundation for modern shipbuilding in Mumbai. “Nusserwanjee was a mistry, a master carpenter who was asked to come to Mumbai as East India Company’s employee and start shipbuilding. His descendants were the famous Wadia shipbuilders, and today we know them as the Wadia business family,” said Gothoskar.
The name Bombay has Portuguese origins. In the 16th century, the Portuguese invaders called the region Bombaim, after the phrase Bom Bahia, which meant ‘good bay’. The British got it as a dowry when Catherine of Breganza married Charles II in May 1662. The crown hardly thought anything of the gift and leased it to the East India Company for a measly sum of 10 pounds a year. The company owned the city till the revolt of 1857, after which the crown established control all over India.
The textile merchants and stock brokers used to sit under two banyan trees in the Fort area of Bombay and carry out their business back in those days. As time passed, old structures made way for new ones. The city continued to grow, eventually expanding into Salsette Island, which is now the Mumbai Suburban district, and up to Thana, which was a Maratha territory till the fall of the empire in 1818. The Indian Railways was born in Mumbai with its first run up to Thana in 1853, which brought the city closer to the suburbs.
The Lumiere brothers brought six short films to India and screened it at the Watson Hotel in Mumbai in 1896. Eventually, Mumbai became the hub of glitz, thanks to big studios like Bombay Talkies of Devika Rani and Himanshu Rai. The term Bollywood emerged much later.
The city continued to evolve and transform with each passing decade. Cut to the 2020s and the old bridges have made way for new ones, coastal roads are being built, the underground Metro Line 3 is fully operational, and new metro lines are under construction across the city.
Yet, it is bursting at the seams, with overcrowded trains and traffic jams. Navi Mumbai was born out of this gridlock, but it did not make the problems disappear. Now, the Third Mumbai is expected to solve all that.
Pankaj Joshi said that Navi Mumbai remained a stillborn city for 20 years because railways reached there late, so it became a dormitory city of Mumbai. “With nearly Rs3 lakh crore invested in mega infrastructure projects in the vicinity of Third Mumbai, the proposed region will help manage density of incoming people and keep the real estate prices under check,” he said. “But one must remember that things are not going to change overnight. Dependence on the main city will remain for some years as everything is not going to move overnight.”
The Atal Setu, a 22km sea bridge connecting Mumbai to the mainland near the Navi Mumbai Airport, was opened in 2024. The area from where it lands to the airport—and the surrounding region—is set to undergo a massive transformation as the Third Mumbai project takes off.
Currently, the region falls under multiple authorities, including the City and Industrial Development Corporation and the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority. CIDCO will serve as the nodal body executing the Third Mumbai project. “This entire region is being redrawn, literally,” said an official.
The Navi Mumbai International Airport itself is expected to give a significant boost to the region. The old Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, located in the heart of Mumbai, has already reached its full capacity of around 55 million passengers, with no space for expansion.
Mumbai’s first airport was the Juhu Aerodrome, which opened in 1928. The terminal one and two of the Mumbai airport were sites of the Royal Air Force airstrip that was constructed in 1942. It was handed over for civilian use in 1948 and became known as Santacruz airport. Currently, the domestic terminal is called Santacruz, while the international terminal is called Sahar. The airport was named after Shivaji in 1999, and Maharaj was suffixed 19 years later.
The Navi Mumbai airport will help decongest the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj airport, just as the Third Mumbai will help the mega city achieve that. This is the third attempt to decentralise Mumbai. In the 1970s, as the city got crowded, planners recognised the need to develop an entirely new town, and that was how Navi Mumbai came into being.
Navi Mumbai is situated on Maharashtra’s mainland across the sea from Mumbai city, and was carved out from Thane and Raigad (previously Kulaba) districts. Before the 1970s, the area was home to some 90 villages where the Agri, Koli and Bhandari communities caught fish, made salt and tapped toddy. Vashi, Turbhe and Belapur, which are now known as nodes of Navi Mumbai, were the original villages. Each node was named after the prominent village in that node.
Some of the family chieftains in these villages were the Naiks, Mhatres, Patils, Thakurs and Patkars. A number of prominent politicians from Navi Mumbai belong to these families that lived in the original 90 villages. Ganesh Naik, senior Maharashtra BJP minister is one of them. He was a Shiv Sena minister in the first Sena-BJP government from 1995-1999 and had gifted 100 ambulances to his party for social work on the birthday of Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray.
The area became Maratha country when Chimaji Appa Peshwe (younger brother of Bajirao Peshwa the first) chased the Portuguese out from Vasai in 1737. The Marathas did not enter Bombay then because it belonged to the East India Company. To keep an eye on the activities of the British, the Marathas posted a small but effective naval fleet at Uran (which will come under the Third Mumbai), under admiral Kanhoji Angre, and later his sons.
When Maharashtra decided to create Navi Mumbai, CIDCO was entrusted with the work. The idea was to build a planned city on the mainland east of Mumbai, with self-contained zones offering educational institutions, markets, hospitals and other civic amenities.
What began as tentative steps with the development of Vashi—a suburb just across the harbour from Mumbai’s Mankhurd—today stretches from the shores of the creek all the way to neighbouring Thane and Panvel in Raigad district, spread across an area of 340sqkm.
Navi Mumbai was built from scratch as a structurally designed metropolitan centre based on the plans by the late architect Charles Correa. Other key figures behind its development included engineer and planner Shirish Patel and pioneering architect and city planner Pravina Mehta. It was, in many ways, their vision of a better Mumbai.
Correa had envisaged even shifting the Mantralaya, the administrative headquarters of the Maharashtra government, and other government offices to Navi Mumbai. Had it been implemented, Mumbai would have been significantly decongested, and Navi Mumbai’s stature might have increased manifold. But successive governments never agreed, and Navi Mumbai, in a way, remained Mumbai’s younger sibling.
Navi Mumbai remained a ghost town for many years and travel to Vashi used to be an ordeal till the Vashi creek bridge was built. There was no railway in Navi Mumbai at the time and one had to travel to Mankhurd by rail and then hop on to CIDCO’s green buses to reach Vashi. One could also take a train to Thane and access a CIDCO bus to Vashi or Belapur.
Much has changed over the years—from roads and flyovers to the expansion of the suburban railway system and the steadily growing metro network. The development of the Mumbai-Pune Expressway brought Navi Mumbai closer to Pune, further aiding its growth.
Parts of the region were already home to major chemical companies such as NOCIL, Herdillia Chemicals and BASF. Over time, as the government promoted Maharashtra as an information technology hub, services companies, software firms and educational centres set up shop in Navi Mumbai.
The establishment of the Jawaharlal Nehru Port, commissioned in 1989, paved the way for Navi Mumbai to become a logistics hub. Today, the city hosts a bevy of major companies—from Reliance Industries, which operates the Dhirubhai Knowledge City, to software services giants such as Accenture, Capgemini and L&T Infotech.
The Maharashtra government’s IT Policy is expected to give Navi Mumbai a further boost. The government has ambitious plans to position the city as India’s data centre hub. Given its favourable location on the western coast, Navi Mumbai already accounts for close to 60 per cent of India’s data centre capacity. A well-planned ecosystem, round-the-clock electricity, a skilled workforce and multiple international undersea cable landing points make it an attractive digital destination.
The Navi Mumbai International Airport has further enhanced the city’s appeal. The NMIA would be the so-called starting point of the Third Mumbai, which will be spread across Uran, Pen, Khalapur and Panvel taluks of Raigad district.
These taluks have a rich history of their own. Pen has historically been famous for its Lord Ganesh idols. Parvatibai, the wife of Peshwa Sadashivrao Bhau, who led the Maratha armies in the third battle of Panipat, originally belonged to the Kolhatkar family of ayurveda experts from Pen. Khalapur is the taluk where Netoji Palkar, the famous general of Shivaji, was born. The taluk also has Umberkhind, where a famous battle took place between Shivaji and Kartalab Khan, the general of Aurangzeb.
At Chirner in Uran tehsil, a forest satyagraha took place in the 1930s against the British. The British tried to suppress the satyagraha and ordered the police to open fire and many people died. Chirner will now be part of the Third Mumbai under the proposed Chirner-Sai-Karnala development project. Karnala is famous for its fort and bird sanctuary. Near Karnala is Shirdhon, the village of Vasudev Balvant Phadke, the famous revolutionary who is hailed as ‘Aadya Krantikarak’ (first revolutionary). His mansion in Shirdhon village has been converted into a memorial.
Chief Minister Fadnavis has also announced a new business district in the Third Mumbai, which will take shape as the Raigad-Pen smart city, much like the Bandra Kurla Complex, spread over 250 hectares. The land has been identified and all necessary permissions have been given. Investors from the US, the UAE, Singapore, Australia and the Netherlands have shown interest in investing and MoUs worth nearly Rs1 lakh crore rupees were signed recently at Davos. The smart city will be a joint venture between the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) and a private company that has the land parcel and all necessary approvals.
Fadnavis also announced an innovation city in the Third Mumbai at Davos, which will be set up near the Navi Mumbai airport. It is expected to create an innovation ecosystem in the state and will have all the necessary plug and play facilities for innovators on 300 acres. “This will not just be an innovation hub, rather it will be a city which will host several AI and innovation hubs,” Fadnavis said. A memorandum of understanding has been signed between the government and ANSR, a global firm specialising in global capability centres (GCCs), to develop a dedicated GCC city. While ANSR will design and develop GCCs, identifying suitable land parcels and streamlining approvals and coordination between departments will be the government’s focus.
For decades, the city’s business district was concentrated in south Mumbai, much of it reclaimed land. The Bandra Kurla Complex was developed by MMRDA starting in 1977 on 370 hectares, though it was proposed in the late 1940s. Then, through the 1990s, marshland along the Mithi river was transformed into the sprawling BKC, now the nerve centre of India’s financial system, housing major banks, the National Stock Exchange of India and many key regulators.
In the years to come, Navi Mumbai will get its own business district in Kharghar, which has a suburban railway station. Spread across 155 hectares, it will mirror BKC and could strengthen Navi Mumbai’s position as the new growth hub of the metropolitan region.
No wonder Navi Mumbai is witnessing a real estate boom. Major development works, particularly the airport, have pushed land prices up by over 50 per cent in parts of the city. Housing prices have also risen between 20 and 40 per cent, according to property consultants. As more infrastructure takes shape, Navi Mumbai could finally emerge from Mumbai’s shadow and establish itself as the region’s primary centre of activity.
The Navi Mumbai airport, proposed by CIDCO in 1997, was planned for an initial annual capacity of 20 million passengers, with one operational terminal and runway, eventually scaling up to four terminals, an additional runway and a capacity of 90 million passengers.
“The Navi Mumbai International Airport is expected to unlock a multi-nodal growth belt from Navi Mumbai through Panvel to the Raigad district. This is likely to have a significant ripple effect across residential, commercial, retail and industrial asset classes,” said Anshuman Magazine of CBRE, a commercial real estate services and investment firm. The airport is located in Ulwe suburb, once a village in Raigad district.
Once the airport is fully operational, an aerocity will follow within a radius of 2.5km. There will be commercial complexes, hotels, residential areas, mixed-use entertainment zones and malls featuring leading brands. “The Navi Mumbai Aerocity Plan, backed by integrated infrastructure, seamless connectivity and proximity to a strong talent pool, positions the region as a strategic growth engine for MMR,” said Sanjay Dutt, CEO and MD, Tata Realty and Infrastructure. “Navi Mumbai currently houses nearly 22 million sqft of institutional office stock, and another 4 million sqft of new supply is expected by 2028, supported by an annual demand of 1.5 to 2 million sqft. The new airport will further strengthen this trajectory.”
The region is already witnessing the impact, with capital values projected to appreciate by around 3 per cent annually until 2027, particularly in the IT and commercial sectors. Dutt said the airport and aerocity project have sparked growing interest from BFSI, engineering, manufacturing and life sciences companies. As occupiers increasingly look beyond saturated micro-markets in Mumbai, the region offers a compelling value proposition—accessibility, scalability and a rich talent base.
Beyond the aerocity, about 4km from the airport, a Navi Mumbai International Education City, with student housing facilities for 80,000 will come up. A 300-acre parcel has been earmarked for this. “We have promised accommodation for 13,000 teachers,” said an official. “There will be common areas with auditoriums and recreational areas and 12 swimming pools.”
Each university will be allotted around 12 acres on a long lease of 30-40 years. This project is estimated to cost about Rs20,000 crore. Around seven universities from the UK, the US and Australia have already evinced interest in establishing centres, said the official. “The ministry of education has given them letter of intent to operate,” he said.
There are also plans to set up a 120-acre innovation city. A strong connection between industry and academia fosters research, innovation and employment. The hope is that different companies will establish their innovation ecosystems here, as the government can offer land at significantly lower rates. Sources said that 12 companies have signed up for the venture.
The government has set up an AI data centre park over 120 acres, and nearly 80 per cent of the allotment has been completed. Talks have been initiated with global players such as Warner Bros. to establish entertainment parks and resorts—a move to attract tourists, generate business and spur hotel development.
Raigad, with its vast land parcels and improving access to employment hubs, was well-positioned to host mid-income and premium residential developments, said Magazine of CBRE. “Its proximity to the new airport, Jawaharlal Nehru Port and the new expressways is expected to attract a diverse demography, from working professionals to entrepreneurs,” he said.
Raigad district is named after the Raigad Fort, the seat of Shivaji Maharaj’s empire. His coronation took place in Raigad in 1674. The fort, which is approximately 175km from Panvel, has the memorial of Shivaji Maharaj and his favourite dog, Waghya (tiger).
The Third Mumbai presents a transformative opportunity to reimagine how urban India grows. “With the airport as a nucleus and major transport linkages such as the Atal Setu and the coastal road connecting the region to Greater Mumbai, this corridor will naturally attract large-scale residential development,” said Dutt.
Importantly, he said, this would also help decentralise demand from core Mumbai and make home ownership more accessible without compromising on quality of life or connectivity.
What remains to be seen is whether Fadnavis’s ambitious plan—he is even planning a Fourth Mumbai near the proposed Vadhavan Port with another airport—will take shape as envisioned, or whether it will eventually become a congested, difficult-to-live-in metropolis on Mumbai’s outskirts.