Saket Mohta and the capital architecture reshaping Eastern India's institutional real estate

Eastern India's real estate market has long operated in the shadow of Mumbai, Bengaluru, and the NCR corridor. That dynamic is changing. Kolkata attracted institutional real estate investments worth nearly $0.4 billion (approximately ₹3,500 crore) in 2025, a 400% increase from ₹650 crore in 2024, according to Colliers India. The city's office leasing volumes surged 69% year-on-year to 2.3 million sq ft, the strongest performance in over a decade, as reported by Knight Frank India.

At the center of this transformation stands Merlin Group, the Kolkata-based conglomerate led by Managing Director Saket Mohta. With 20 million sq ft of developed real estate and 10 million sq ft under construction, Merlin has emerged as the most prominent platform developer in the eastern corridor. The trajectory of the company, and its leadership, offers a strategic lens through which to examine whether Eastern India's institutional capital formation is a durable structural shift or a cyclical anomaly.

Who is Saket Mohta and why does Merlin Group matter to Eastern India's real estate thesis?

Saket Mohta represents a generation of Indian real estate leaders who inherited family-built platforms and are now repositioning them for institutional-grade capital deployment. Merlin Group, under his leadership, has scaled across residential, commercial, and mixed-use segments, building a development portfolio that rivals several nationally recognized developers in sheer volume.

The significance of Mohta's platform extends beyond project delivery. In a market historically dominated by fragmented, family-run developers with limited institutional engagement, Merlin's scale provides a critical aggregation point. Institutional investors entering Eastern India require counterparties capable of absorbing large-format capital, executing across asset classes, and maintaining governance standards consistent with global limited partner expectations. Merlin's 30-million-sq-ft combined portfolio (developed and under construction) positions it as one of the few platforms in the region capable of fulfilling that role.

This matters because institutional capital follows concentration. The 400% year-on-year increase in Kolkata's institutional investment, as documented by Colliers India, did not arrive in a vacuum. It reflects the maturation of a handful of platforms, Merlin chief among them, that can structure transactions at the scale global investors require.

For members of GRI Institute who track India's evolving capital architecture, the eastern corridor represents a frontier where platform-level leadership directly determines capital allocation. In more mature markets like Mumbai or Bengaluru, institutional capital has multiple competing destinations. In Kolkata, the pipeline is narrower, making individual leadership decisions disproportionately consequential.

Can Kolkata sustain institutional momentum amid residential headwinds and regulatory scrutiny?

The bullish narrative around Kolkata demands scrutiny on two fronts: residential market weakness and emerging legal risks surrounding key market participants.

On the residential side, Kolkata housing sales dropped 12% to approximately 16,125 units in 2025 from 18,335 units in 2024, according to Anarock. This decline mirrored a broader national trend, but it introduces a tension in the investment thesis. The office and institutional segments are accelerating while the residential market, traditionally the backbone of Eastern India's real estate economy, is contracting.

There are structural reasons for cautious optimism. Kolkata recorded 2,222 residential unit launches in Q1 2026, a 48% quarter-on-quarter growth, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Industry voices, including those from CREDAI Kolkata, anticipate that expected reductions in interest rates and lower EMIs will boost demand in the mid-segment and affordable housing categories through 2026. Whether this supply-side confidence translates into absorption remains an open question.

The more material risk factor is regulatory. In April 2026, the Enforcement Directorate conducted searches at premises linked to Merlin Group and its promoters, including Sushil and Saket Mohta, under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). The investigation relates to alleged land grabbing and forged documents. The case is active as of April 2026.

Any strategic assessment of Mohta's role in Eastern India's institutional trajectory must account for this development directly. Institutional capital is structurally sensitive to governance risk. Global limited partners and sovereign wealth funds apply rigorous compliance screens before committing to emerging market platforms. An active PMLA investigation, regardless of its eventual outcome, introduces headline risk that could slow institutional capital formation in the near term.

The Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, or RERA, provides the broader regulatory architecture that has structurally strengthened India's real estate markets and boosted buyer confidence. RERA's fully operational framework in West Bengal offers a counterweight to firm-specific risks by establishing transparent project registration and compliance standards. Yet RERA governance at the market level cannot fully substitute for governance at the firm level, particularly when the firm in question is the region's largest development platform.

For institutional investors evaluating Kolkata allocations, the calculus becomes layered. The macro opportunity is clear: a city demonstrating 69% office leasing growth and a 400% increase in institutional investment is signaling structural demand. The micro risk, concentrated in the governance profile of the market's dominant platform developer, introduces a variable that sophisticated capital will price accordingly.

What does Eastern India's capital formation mean for India's broader real estate investment map?

The institutional capital entering Kolkata is significant in its own right, but its strategic importance lies in what it reveals about India's evolving real estate geography. For the past two decades, institutional capital in Indian real estate has been overwhelmingly concentrated in the top three or four metropolitan corridors. The emergence of Kolkata as a recipient of meaningful institutional flows suggests that the investment map is expanding.

Several structural factors support this thesis. India's digital infrastructure buildout, including data center demand, is creating new asset classes in cities previously underserved by institutional capital. Urbanization patterns are dispersing economic activity beyond traditional gateway cities. And a maturing RERA framework has reduced the regulatory discount that investors historically applied to secondary markets.

Kolkata's office market performance is particularly instructive. The 2.3 million sq ft leased in 2025, as Knight Frank India reported, reflects genuine occupier demand driven by technology services, financial back-offices, and shared services centers choosing the city for its cost arbitrage and talent availability. This occupier-led demand is the most durable foundation for institutional capital deployment because it reduces speculative risk.

The question facing India's real estate leadership, and a recurring theme in discussions within the GRI Institute community, is whether the capital architecture being built in Eastern India can mature beyond dependence on a small number of platform developers. Market resilience requires depth. A corridor that relies on one or two dominant players for institutional-grade product is inherently more fragile than one with a diversified developer ecosystem.

This is where the Saket Mohta narrative becomes representative rather than merely individual. His trajectory at Merlin Group encapsulates the opportunity and the vulnerability of India's emerging real estate corridors. The opportunity is scale: a 20-million-sq-ft track record and a 10-million-sq-ft pipeline represent meaningful institutional product in a capital-starved market. The vulnerability is concentration: when a single platform carries this much of the market's institutional credibility, any disruption to that platform, whether legal, financial, or operational, reverberates across the entire corridor.

Institutional real estate markets mature when they develop redundancy, meaning multiple platforms, diversified capital sources, and robust regulatory enforcement. Kolkata is in the early stages of this process. The 2025 investment data, with its dramatic year-on-year growth, marks an inflection point rather than a destination.

The strategic picture

Saket Mohta and Merlin Group sit at the intersection of Eastern India's most consequential real estate dynamics: surging institutional capital, strong office market fundamentals, residential market recalibration, and active regulatory scrutiny. Each of these forces will shape the region's trajectory over the next 24 to 36 months.

The data points are unambiguous in their direction. A 400% increase in institutional investment, 69% growth in office leasing, and nearly 50% quarter-on-quarter growth in residential launches collectively describe a market in acceleration. The PMLA investigation introduces a governance variable that institutional capital cannot ignore.

For leaders in Indian real estate and global investors evaluating the country's next wave of institutional opportunity, Eastern India warrants close attention. The capital architecture being assembled in Kolkata, with Mohta's Merlin Group as its most visible pillar, will either validate the thesis that India's institutional real estate map is genuinely expanding or reveal the limits of corridor development built on concentrated platforms.

GRI Institute continues to track the institutional capital dynamics shaping India's real estate markets, including Eastern India's emerging corridors, through its research, events, and member community. The evolution of Kolkata's market will remain a focal point as the region's capital architecture takes definitive shape.