Time has stood still for the ghost housing societies of Greater Noida. Three years ago when this correspondent walked the broad roads of Sector MU-I in Greater Noida, with their lovely service road trees leading to gated communities, he had found few people actually living in the fully finished housing societies. Now in June 2018, nothing much has changed. What looks like an ideal picture perfect housing dream-villas, trees, roads, parking, community centre, parks-has one thing missing: human beings. If at dusk, the sight of the empty lightless windows gives the ghost town its name, even in the bright June day there were hardly any people in the area to point out directions
In sector MU-I, that was built by the Uttar Pradesh government more than a decade ago, four out of five houses are vacant and many of the empties are badly dilapidated. Despite the existing empties, a little ahead of the existing residential block, another block of low-rise government housing with about 1,000 apartments is under construction. Several private developers are also building high-rise residential apartments in the area. The multi-crore question to this correspondent came from the befuddled cab driver-if already people are reluctant to live, who will buy the new flats?
The answer to this question is the answer to why there are ghost societies in Greater Noida and elsewhere in the Delhi suburbs. Sector MU-I is not an isolated case; there are other sectors with residential complexes, both government and private, in Greater Noida sharing the fate of this sector. The ghost complexes exist in other areas of NCR like Greater Noida West (earlier known as Noida Extension), Raj Nagar Extension, Nahar-par areas of Faridabad, Kundli, Dwarka-Expressway and so on. Most of these locations have occupancy levels of 10-40%.
