It was, by his own account, a chance encounter with a scion of the Gandhi political dynasty that turned former soldier Kushal Pal Singh into the man who built a city from nothing and made billions in the process.
“You have to salute the old man to have thought at the time of putting together an entire site and not be tempted to gain by selling parcels of land to other developers”
ANUJ PURI Chairman, JLL India
Singh was toppled from his spot as India's richest property developer last October, when his company DLF Ltd was hit with an unprecedented three-year ban from capital markets, accused by regulators of failing to disclose key information at the time of its record-breaking 2007 market listing.
Investors wiped more than $1.3 billion off the company's market value after the decision, which is still being appealed. DLF shares last week were trading around 148 rupees, compared with a 52-week high of 242.80 and a 52-week low of 100 rupees.
A village boy turned visionary developer, Singh is largely unknown outside India. But as the man who built the "boom city" of Gurgaon outside New Delhi and fostered the outsourcing industry — with a little help, he says, from former General Electric boss Jack Welch — he has been among the most influential Indian names of recent decades.
Born into a Jat family 1931 in Uttar Pradesh, Singh studied aeronautical engineering in Britain and was subsequently selected for the Indian Army by British Officers Services Selection Board. Commissioned into The Deccan Horse cavalry regiment, he went on to enjoy a distinguished military career, but in 1961 he left the army to join his father-in-law's property business.
Chaudhary Raghvendra Singh, a former civil servant, had founded Delhi Land & Finance (DLF) in 1946, a year ahead of Indian independence. Reasoning correctly that the partition of India and Pakistan would touch off a huge migration, he started buying up land. A series of successful residential estates followed, but the government nationalised land development in Delhi in 1957 and DLF had to switch gears dramatically.
The patriarch entered the car battery and electrical motor business with US-based Universal Electric as a joint-venture partner, and the young KP Singh was assigned to run the venture.
However, Singh and his father-in-law were still determined to get back into real estate and challenge the state's grip if need be. Over 15 years they assembled the land holdings that would become the foundation for Gurgaon — and for a fortune that Forbes magazine estimated last September at $3.9 billion.
In his autobiography, Whatever the Odds, Singh describes how in 1980 he accidentally met Rajiv Gandhi, who would serve as India's prime minister from 1984 to 1989, when the latter was travelling to Gurgaon and had stopped for water to cool his car's radiator.
Singh recalls how he shared his plan for the dry and desolate Gurgaon region, and his future was sealed. Young Gandhi subsequently leaned on troublesome local authorities for years, even while he was premier, and DLF was on its way.
The chance meeting served DLF well for several years during which Singh — even at 82, a sharp dresser with military bearing — amassed 3,500 acres of land in Gurgaon, some of it still undeveloped.
"You have to salute the old man to have thought at the time of putting together an entire site and not be tempted to gain by selling parcels of land to other developers," said Anuj Puri, chairman and country head of Jones Lang LaSalle, a property consultancy that advises DLF.
To its cheerleaders, Gurgaon, the city Singh imagined and built 25 kilometres outside New Delhi, is a prototype of where young, upwardly mobile Indians want to live and work. The outsourcing boom has made the city India's third-richest.
"It is India's first smart city," said Rajeev Talwar, executive director at DLF. "Its infrastructure may be creaking ... but there is a new part which supports a new kind of life."
To its detractors, though, Gurgaon is the epitome of the fervid real estate speculation and dysfunctional urban sprawl that threaten India's cities as populations boom. Water and power are unreliable, social problems abound and private contractors have had to step in where the police have failed. Its population has ballooned by about three-quarters to 1.5 million people in the decade to 2011.
Last year was a difficult year for Singh, whose fate from the start has been closely tied to that of the Gandhi family. Haryana, the state neighbouring Delhi and including Gurgaon, had long been a stronghold for the family and the Congress party.
But after a decade in power the Congress Party, led by Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv's widow, was ousted in last May's general election by Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party. Voters in Haryana threw out Congress in a state election in October in favour of the BJP, which won an absolute majority for the first time.
"There are businesses that have benefited from managing their political connections, and real estate is one of them," said an executive whose company works with DLF, but did not wish to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.
However, politics has also cost Singh dearly — DLF has been pulled up several times by opposition party members and anti-corruption activists who accused it of improper land deals with family members of Sonia Gandhi.
It is familiar ground for Singh, whose falling-out with Haryana's Congress chief minister in the 1980s cost DLF nearly a decade of lost development opportunities.
But the timing of the regulator's order last October, two days before the Haryana state polls, strengthened the view of some that there would come a time when DLF's close ties with Congress would work against it.
For the Securities and Exchanges Board of India (Sebi), it was simply about targeting the big fish, in a bid to improve investor confidence. DLF and its supporters, meanwhile, have said that they would seek to work with the government, regardless of political shades.
Singh is now focusing his energy on overturning the trading ban imposed by Sebi on the company and six top executives including himself. The regulator alleged "active and deliberate suppression" of material information ahead of the DLF initial public offering in 2007, the largest in Indian history at the time.
Singh maintains that he and DLF have done nothing wrong, and last week he even suggested that there should be a provision in law to sue regulators if their decisions get overturned at later stages.
DLF is also challenging an order passed by the Competition Commission of India (CCI), which fined the company 6.3 billion rupees for unfair practices. That case has now reached the Supreme Court.
But even detractors say Singh and DLF are certain to recover from the setbacks.
"It is not the end of the road for them. These companies don't disappear," said Prashant Bhushan, a veteran lawyer and anti-corruption activist who has long campaigned against DLF.
By Aditi Shah of Reuters in New Delhi, with additional material from India Today and Economic Times