State-owned National Textile Corporation (NTC) today floated tenders for selling its 10.5-acre Poddar Mills land in Mumbai through online auction. It has set a reserve price of Rs 250 crore for the plot with a built-up area of 10,458 square metres.
This is the first time NTC is conducting an e-auction of the land it owns in the country.
The bidding will be held between July 29 and July 31. A pre-bid meeting will take place on July 21.
All the bidders have to obtain digital certificates from any one of the authorised providers such as information technology major TCS and state-run telecom company MTNL. With these certificates, each bid will be considered authentic and submitted by a particular entity.
Once this procedure is over, the bidders will be provided login IDs and passwords and will need to log in at the given time. They will then need to bid with the incremental value fixed by NTC.
The screen will flash the highest bid whenever a highest bid is made. If anyone bids at the last minute (the bidding ends on 5 pm on July 31), there will be an extension of 10 minutes to give the time for all bidders to match the highest bid. An executive involved in bidding said a maximum of three extensions of 10 minutes is allowed.
NTC currently owns 90 acres from a total of nine mills in Mumbai. It plans to raise around Rs 4,000 crore through selling all the plots in the coming months.
The success of e-auction of the third generation (3G) spectrum by the Department of Telecommunications prompted NTC to go for an online auction. In 2007, Tatas won Anglo-Dutch steel maker Corus in an e-auction.
“The online auction is very transparent as all bidders can see what is happening. This has worked well for 3G auction,” said an NTC official.
The company, which also wants to sell its Bharath Mills land in Mumbai, had postponed the pre-bid meeting slated for June 24 as it wanted to change the auction format from physical to online, said an NTC official.
The eight-acre mill land has a reserve price of Rs 750 crore.
Real estate consultants say the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority’s willingness to buy the Bharath Mills land at the reserve price and develop an affordable housing project also prompted the postponement of the pre-bid meeting.
Earlier, NTC’s plans to sell the Finlay Mills land in the city got embroiled in legal disputes, as the corporation did not accept Mumbai developer Lodha’s bid for the land, which was the highest amount the plot evinced.
