Big malls in big cities Calcutta: 7 Coming up: 30 Delhi: 12 National Capital Region*: 43 Mumbai: 19 Hyderabad: 16 Bangalore: 7 Chennai: 10

Smile, mall-hoppers, the creaking old city will soon be a paradise unlimited for you.

By 2010, Calcutta will have around 30 functioning malls of various formats and sizes. With an average floor area of 300,000sqft a mall, it could turn out to be a whopping 10 million square feet of organised retail space in and around the city in the next three years — an impressive figure to say the least.

And more so if you take into account that Calcutta was not even on the radar of most companies even five to seven years back.

While retailing has been an encouraging story over the past three years in the city, it has also fuelled high levels of employment generation.

Propertt highlights five factors responsible for turning Calcutta into a retail hotspot.

Performance of retailers contrary to perception: No one expected the first large-format Pantaloons outlet at Gariahat to rock the city and create a national record by touching Rs 1 crore in sales in a day. None also imagined that Inox at Forum would record one of the highest occupancy levels across the country.

As for MusicWorld, who would have thought it would clock Rs 1 crore in sales in a month. Even the Big Bazaar outlets joined the party to throw up one of the highest “revenue-per-square-foot-per-month” figures nationally.

These are just some of the performance figures of retailers who set up shop in Calcutta early. Result: retailers have been increasingly looking at Calcutta and securing land to board the business bandwagon.

Cost of real estate: The overall cost of land in Calcutta was one of the lowest in the last two-three years and is still on the lower side when compared with that in other metros.

This is one of the reasons retailers — be it in food or entertainment — have been, and are, flocking to the city. It makes sound business sense to invest in a city where cost of land isn’t much of a worry when it comes to calculating profit margins.

Packaging the “emerging Calcutta” story: It has taken some effort by all the stakeholders, including the government, to create a positive perception of the state’s medium- to long-term potential in the minds of industry leaders.

Gradually, investors, industrialists and information technology companies started to see action on the ground and also believe in the “resurgent Bengal” story.

Retailers know that if Calcutta touches the target of 400,000 jobs in IT or IT-enabled services, thousands of pockets will have cash to spare and splurge. In other words, it would mean need for organised retail.

Changing attitude of consumers: For most consumers, the “high savings, low spending” credo no longer holds. There has been a marked shift in the overall attitude over the past decade and consumers in the city now have as much demand for lifestyle products and international-standard convenience as their counterparts in any other metro.

Exposure levels have gone up, pay packets are getting fatter, and young, educated double-income couples are no longer a rare sight. All this has culminated into a growing demand for organised retail.

As for the parsimonious doubting Thomases, all they need to do is visit City Centre, Forum, Metropolis or 22 Camac Street on a weekend.

The only metro catering to the whole of the east: Calcutta, thanks to its location, is the economic hub for all the states in the east and neighbouring countries like Bangladesh.

With the economy of some states like Orissa and Jharkhand also looking up, Calcutta, analysts say, is expected to reap the benefits of the predicted boom.

No retailer in his right senses would like to miss the bus.