Raheja chairman felicitated by state housing body

MUMBAI: Soon after the Partition of India in 1947, Lachmmandas Raheja came home frantically one day and asked his family to immediately vacate their home in Karachi (now in Pakistan). They were told to leave in the following one hour and move to the city. The Sindhi clan travelled in a cargo ship and arrived in the city virtually penniless. Homeless, they took shelter in a factory at Bombay Central.
The patriarch himself stayed back and arrived several months later, but his eldest sibling Gopal was already preparing to confront the setback the family had experienced.A decade later, young Gopal along with his father and brother would go on to establish Raheja Brothers, one of the pioneers of India's construction industry.
Five decades later, Gopal Raheja, chairman of K Raheja Construction, was felicitated by the Maharashtra Chamber of Housing Industry (MCHI) with its first Lifetime Achievement Award on Wednesday. Among those present at the function held at a south Mumbai hotel were chief minister Ashok Chavan, Union minister for power Sushilkumar Shinde, top developers, bankers, architects and engineers.
The 76-year-old developer, commonly known in industry circles as G L, was reticent to talk when contacted by this newspaper. However, friends and sources close to the family said his life is a virtual rags-to-riches story. "At one time, soon after their arrival from Karachi, 20 members of the Raheja family stayed in a two-room rented apartment with a common toilet in Andheri,'' said one of them. Interestingly, much before he became a developer, G L worked for the then Bombay Housing Board as a civil engineer, earning a salary of Rs 270 a month in 1957.
The Rahejas were also one of the first developers in the Bandra-Khar-Santa Cruz belt. "Gopal along with his late father and uncle, constructed their first building at 3rd Road in Khar and sold flats at the rate of Rs 20 a sq ft in the late 1950s,'' said one of his acquaintances. Today, his group claims to have completed 2,000 projects all over the country.
Besides starting the Shopper's Stop chain in 1992, G L also co-founded the S L Raheja Hospital. He is founder trustee of L S Raheja School of Architecture & Arts, L S Raheja College of Arts & Commerce and L S Raheja Technical Institute.