Lavasa: Maharashtra’s new planned city

Lavasa

Welcome to the UKIBC Skills Sector View. This month I focus on some exciting skills opportunities I scoped in Lavasa, a private hill city in the Indian state of Maharashtra.

Lavasa

Lavasa is being developed primarily by the Hindustan Construction Company (HCC), Lavasa Corporation. The city is conveniently located near the Mumbai-Pune economic corridor along the Warasgaon Lake, about an hour’s drive from Pune, and 4 hours from Mumbai. As one of the largest urban infrastructure projects in India, Lavasa offers significant economic benefits to the region.

Spread across 25,000 acres, Lavasa has been carefully planned with a good mix of living, commercial, educational and recreational spaces. The design has been based on the principles of new urbanism.

The vision

Lavasa city has been planned for a permanent population of 300,000 residents and a tourist inflow of two million visitors per year. The city’s urban infrastructure, which is of a level yet unseen in India, presents great potential for tourism. This in turn means abundant opportunities for skills development, particularly in sectors like construction, hospitality, retail, leisure, sports and healthcare. In addition, there is also potential for growth in the IT and biotech industries, KPOs, R&D companies, art and fashion. The city’s picturesque location, infrastructure and proximity to nature have also made Lavasa an attractive setting for Bollywood films, which can also present opportunities for skills development in media and entertainment.

To cope with the city’s rapid growth and new businesses, Lavasa Tourism has already set up local skilling institutions and has plans to upscale the model.

Proposed skills interventions in Lavasa

Based on a preliminary survey at Lavasa by the education team of the HCC, the proposed interventions may be classified into:

Short term interventions:

• Livelihood programmes for wage and youth self-employment
• Development of skills clusters with a focus on skilling workers in construction, hospitality, tourism, facility management services and entertainment sectors
• Livelihood programmes for local project beneficiaries (LPBs) to be explored through CSR activities where the partner employer plays the role of Program Manager responsible for  end-to-end solutions that impact beneficiaries

Long term Interventions:

In the long term, partner employers would be invited to establish a Multi Skill School (MSS) in association with the Lavasa Corporation. This could be a for profit business venture in which stake holders could co-brand the MSS. This would train and supply the manpower needed in tourism development zones, amusement parks, business townships such as the Gujarat International finance Tec-city (GIFT), and SEZs.

Click here to see some of the courses that could be considered for this MSS.

For further details on the opportunities in skills development in Lavasa and how the UKIBC can help, please contactNeeru.sood@ukibc.com or Jesh.rajasingham@ukibc.com.