> I don't think India has ghost cities in the way you mean.
"Ghost city" in this context almost always means "ghost district" or a bunch of ghost projects located in close proximity. I'm not sure about India, but in China, this is mostly the pattern (e.g. the new-town Kangbashi district of Ordos, or Tianjin's Yujiapu). We are not talking about actual ghost cities (Ordos and Tianjin would not qualify as such).
> I don't think India has ghost cities in the way you mean
There are plenty. Lots of Indian developers collapse due to corruption tangles or inability to secure financing, for example Jaypee Wish Town in NOIDA [0] or the New Chandigarh project in Punjab [1]
Builders will take down payments from buyers and start construction, but might run out of money, get caught up in some corruption scandal, or fail financial compliance checks now that India has been cracking down on bad loans after the IL&FS almost collapsed in 2018.
Luckily, India had UChicago and Harvard trained economic policymakers like Raghuram Rajan, Arvind Subramanian, and Krishnamurthy Subramanian (guys who if they decided to take American citizenship could have become head of the IMF or WB like their peers Ajay Banga and Gita Gopinath) reform the entire banking and finance sector in India. (And in all honestly, it looks like India might hit a similar bust in the next couple years now that the CEA is politically selected backbenchers now)
Vietnam has hit the exact same hurdle India's economy hit in the 2010-17 stagflation and China during the 2015-16 financial crisis - high capex spending but very low consumer spending leaving it open to backlash caused by FDI variability.
Lots of middle class Vietnamese have purchased condos or houses, but the builders collapsed or are in receivership. SCB (Truong's bank) is one of those banks financing these projects.
Unlike China or India, the backbench of experienced policymakers in Vietnam is kinda empty, as most development in the 1980s-2000s was done by international development agencies, and the rest was basically privatized and done by Korean, Japanese, and Chinese companies (eg. The incomplete subway systems in HCMC and Hanoi built by Japan and China respectively). And unlike China, Vietnam is still fairly early in the value chain with major players like Intel considering leaving [2], and unlike India, Vietnam doesn't have a strong consumer or tertiary sector that can cushion the blow [3]
A similar stagnation hit China in the 1990s after the Tiannamen Square massacre, but was resolved by allowing laisse faire capitalism and rolling out the red carpet for foreign and local investors, but the winning faction in this battle is much more skeptical of the anarcho-capitalism that arose in Vietnam in the 2010s.
> There are plenty. Lots of Indian developers collapse due to corruption tangles or inability to secure financing, for example Jaypee Wish Town in NOIDA [0] or the New Chandigarh project in Punjab [1]
Builders scamming isn't infrequent. But surely the scale is no where near that high to be comparable with Chinese ghost towns[1]? From where I am, Bangalore, I do come across a buildings half constructed or abandoned, but that's completely different from whole towns half/fully built but totally unoccupied. What am I missing here?
There are abandoned city projects like Amravati, Lavasa and others. The scale and reason behind ghost cities in India is different. Most stop construction mid way due to financial or regulatory constraints.
Rajan and Arvind Subramanian were opposed. Krishnamurthy Subramanian (Rajan's former doctoral student from decades ago and now Executive Director at the IMF) supported it. My hunch is Krishnamurthy's support came because he worked closely with Luigi Zingales when they were at UChicago, and Zingales' economic philosophy strongly supported these kinds of shocks, plus it allowed Krishnamurthy to climb up the ladder.
Demonetization was brutal, but at least it pushed hundreds of millions from being unbanked to banked, thus making it easier to enforce taxation (while also converting black money into white money).
A similar shock will be needed for both India and Pakistan to revoke the Land Acquisition Act (the British holdover which has held back both countries), as well as to do a judicial overhaul.
This is a good overview of the economic reforms India needs to do to actually become a competitive economy - https://indiareforms.csis.org/
I had the exact same reaction as d3vmax - and quoting one paywalled article about a failed builder does not make “ghost cities” a thing in India. Yes there are fraudsters who cheat people and never build anything, but India does not have the same kind of ghost cities that China does.
It used to be the largest builder in North India, but they were very close to Akilesh Yadav and the Samajwadi Party.
After BJP won the Uttar Pradesh state elections in 2017, Jaypee (which was already struggling with finances) lost a number of tenders in NOIDA, loans were called, and they along with other similar builders caused IL&FS to become insolvent.
It's very similar to the Ghost Cities you'd see in China in the 2000s
Also, India has Google Street View. Go explore OMAXE New Chandigarh, Sector 128, Kharar, etc.
Lots of half built buildings in middle India.
And this is why PMAY-U is being pushed so hard by all parties in India - it's an easy way to bail out builders without breaking financial laws.
You are very focused on the Noida scene. That's an outlier in the Indian real estate situation right now. Almost everywhere, there is a "shortage" of housing, forget about ghost cities. Also after RERA, a lot has changed. You seem very confident in your analysis but honestly you need to look up more.
The backbenchers are doing a better job than mr Rajan, growth numbers are easy to judge for all.
That's not usually what we mean by "Ghost cities". I just checked wikipedia to be sure, for both "ghost cities" and "under occupied developments in China"[1] which leads with:
Under-occupied developments in China are mostly unoccupied property developments in China, and frequently referred to as "ghost cities" or ghost towns.
Half-built structures aren't comparable to the common understanding of the term "ghost cities".
Jaypee Group's failure is not the same as ghost cities of China. Ghost cities of China were fully built but people refused to move in. India has the opposite problem. Most people want to move in to the projects but the builder defaulted and could not complete the project.
India's half built cities are more of a financial fraud problem rather than people problem.
"Ghost city" in this context almost always means "ghost district" or a bunch of ghost projects located in close proximity. I'm not sure about India, but in China, this is mostly the pattern (e.g. the new-town Kangbashi district of Ordos, or Tianjin's Yujiapu). We are not talking about actual ghost cities (Ordos and Tianjin would not qualify as such).