Chief Data Officer / India
Three times a supportable figure cost something
- Space in operation
- 16.0M sq ft
- Four office and five warehousing parks, March 2026
- Company revenue
- ₹1,240 Cr
- Year ended March 2026
- Leases in the system of record
- 486
- Reconciled to billing monthly
- Leased area with measured energy and water
- 96%
- Up from 59 per cent in 2024
Decisions & consequences
01Rebuilding two parks' rent roll before a refinancing valuation
In early 2023 finance arranged to refinance ₹2,100 crore of lease rental discounting loans on our two Pune office parks at a lower rate. The lender required an independent valuation based on a certified rent roll within six weeks. Our draft roll came from the billing system. When my team compared it with the abstracts for the 312 leases at the two parks, we found 47 discrepancies: escalations billed early or late, missing rent-free periods, and chargeable areas that had changed at renewal while the billing record had not.
Hemant Ghatpande, our chief financial officer, wanted to send the draft with a covering note and correct it after closing. His concern was reasonable: the lower rate was available for a limited period, and each week of delay carried interest. I argued that the lender and valuer would rely on the roll as certified, and that a covering note would not travel with the figure into their credit papers. The managing director chose to delay.
We checked every lease against its signed document in five weeks, with legal counsel resolving eleven clauses that the abstracts had read differently. Contracted annual rent fell by ₹9.4 crore from the draft roll. Three discrepancies ran the other way: occupiers had been under-billed by ₹2.6 crore, of which we recovered ₹1.9 crore after discussing each case with them.
The refinancing closed seven weeks late. The additional interest for that period was about ₹1.7 crore, and the lender sanctioned ₹1,980 crore rather than ₹2,100 crore because the valuation reflected the corrected rent. The valuer accepted the roll without adjustment, and the lender's later review raised no rent-roll findings.
The lease abstract is now the system of record, and billing reconciles to it every month. I would act earlier next time. The mismatches had surfaced in a 2022 portfolio review, and I treated them as a backlog rather than a risk. Raising them with the audit committee then would have spared the refinancing its delay.
Paying for meters before occupiers' disclosures relied on our estimates
In 2024 nineteen listed occupiers asked us for the energy and water consumed in their leased space, for their sustainability disclosures. For 41 per cent of leased office area, chilled-water energy was not read at the occupier's floor; it was apportioned by area from the central plant. At three warehousing parks, several occupiers shared one water meter. The leasing team proposed sending the apportioned figures as consumption, as we had in earlier years.
I declined to describe them as measured. Instead I proposed a ₹14.6 crore programme over 26 months: thermal-energy meters on chilled-water lines, smart electricity meters at occupier boards and water meters for each warehouse building. The money came from deferring a ₹16 crore lobby and amenity refurbishment at the Navi Mumbai park by a year. Tanvi Borkhade, who leads leasing, opposed the deferral because two large renewals were due there. Clifford Mendonsa, head of facilities, worried that his team would be judged on readings from meters it had not chosen.
The managing director approved the programme, and Clifford's team selected the meters and took charge of their calibration. Until the meters arrived, occupiers received statements labelling each figure measured, apportioned or estimated.
By March 2026 measured coverage had risen from 59 to 96 per cent of leased area. Twelve office occupiers were using 18 to 30 per cent more chilled-water energy than apportionment implied, and nine were using less; recoveries were rebalanced by ₹4.1 crore a year. At Bhiwandi the new meters showed 14 per cent of supplied water unaccounted for, which traced to a leaking main. One Navi Mumbai renewal went ahead. The other occupier, with 72,000 square feet, consolidated elsewhere and cited amenities among its reasons.
Occupiers' assurance providers now receive a method note with every statement. I would phase metering alongside the refurbishment next time rather than present them as rival claims on one budget; the choice I framed made leasing's loss harder to discuss than it should have been.
Limiting gate and visitor data when leasing wanted more of it
In 2025 we reviewed our access and visitor systems against the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. The office parks recorded about 41,000 turnstile entries and 6,500 visitor registrations a day. The visitor system captured a photograph and an identity-document number and kept both indefinitely. Leasing had asked for badge-level entry data so that it could show each occupier its own attendance and offer flexible space to those using less. Separately, the HR team of a large occupier asked us for named entry logs of its employees.
I recommended collecting less and sharing only aggregates. We stopped recording identity numbers, kept photographs for the day of the visit only, set routine retention of visitor records at 90 days and gave occupiers hourly counts by floor, suppressed wherever fewer than 20 people were counted. Our head of security wanted a year's retention for investigations, and Tanvi's team lost a proposition it had prepared for months. We settled on longer holds only where a security incident had been logged, approved by security and recorded by my team.
The occupier wanting named logs escalated to our managing director. We explained that, as the employer, it could record attendance through its own systems with its own notice to employees, and that we would not pass on records collected for building security. It later installed its own readers inside its premises.
After legal review we deleted 3.8 million historical visitor records. Reconfiguring the systems and rewriting the notices in English, Marathi and Hindi cost ₹1.6 crore. Registration at the visitor desk fell from about four minutes to under two, because the desk was asking for less. The aggregated counts now feed the third occupancy measure reported to our board.
I would change the sequence. I drafted the retention schedule first and invited security to challenge it. Starting from the incidents security actually investigates would probably have reached the same answer, with less suspicion that privacy was being imposed on safety.