Mumbai’s Latest Suburb?
All eyes on Alibag
Over the years it’s come to be referred to as Mumbai’s ‘Hamptons’, an allusion to America’s Long Island beach resort, where tony New Yorkers spent their summers.
But Alibag, lying 120 km south of Mumbai has a rich history of its own, dating back to Kanhoji Angrey, the swashbuckling admiral of the Maratha Navy among others; including a thriving community of Bene Israel Jews and a local populace of fisher folk and farmers.
Legend has it that when Mumbai- based Cambridge educated executive Jay Watsa and his artsy wife Kiki decided to buy land in Alibag’s Nagaon, to build a weekend family home in 1967, they had proceeded from there in a convoy of bullock carts at 4am to collect supplies for its construction from Thal.
“It was un-spoilt, virgin territory; the villagers had never seen a car, and beach-touch land was selling at ₹3-5000 an acre,” says a member of the pioneering clan. “Today it’s a minimum of 5/6 crore for the same.” “My association with Alibag started in the mid-’80s. We used to race from Gateway to Mandwa on weekends. I fell in love with the place,” says Commodore Surinder Mongia, an Arjuna Award-winning sailor, who bought a piece of land about 3km from the jetty and took up residence there after retirement in ’94.
Though only a handful of Mumbaiites could follow Mongia’s example of taking up permanent residence in Alibag, from the 90s it seemed there was a whole swathe of city folk seeking accommodation there.
These consisted of budget inns and boutique hotels for day-trippers, company guest houses for executives, modest cottages for writers and artists, and sprawling hacienda-like weekend homes for HNI professionals, tycoons, and film stars.
Slowly, with easier accessibility, thanks to AC ferry services and later zippy speedboats between Apollo Bunder and Mandwa, Alibag became the go-to weekend destination for Mumbaiites in need of sunshine, space, and leisure.
Alibag designer Pinakin Patel’s museum-like furniture store, added to the attraction along with the fact that some of Mumbai’s top restaurateurs began delivery services and pop-ups to Alibag.
Leading F&B veteran Nilima Daruwala, one of the brains behind Ten94, says it was in the middle of the lockdown when 5 Alibag-based women, who had a common dream started the home store and that its reception was better than imagined.” Alibag was a sleepy town that had no activities or places to visit,” she says.
Everyone concedes that the real game-changer was Roro.
According to Aashim Mongia, son of Commodore Mongia, who, along with his business partner Devika Saigal Kapoor is joint owner of the venture, it had been a topic of discussion for over 25 years.
Mongia, whose first memories of getting to Alibag had been as a child arriving on a sailboat transferring, midsea to a row boat and wading through water with bags aloft, says the change began when the duo took over the management of the Mandwa Port and the introduced cafes, restrooms, stores which added considerable additional footfall.
“Pitching for the Roro was a logical next step,” says Mongia, adding, “The government’s initiative in Sagarmala is driving growth and the Roro is one the best public-private developments today.”
But given how much of a game-changer the Roro’s been, few realise how shaky its start was. Officially opening on 14 March 2020, the government declared a nationwide lockdown on 20 March, which was a devastating setback for a new venture.
But since the resumption of its services in August that year, it has been running to full capacity, especially in the monsoons, when other means of transport are unavailable or fraught.