Chief Financial Officer / India
Four times the cautious answer cost money first
- Pre-sales, year to March 2026
- ₹4,120 Cr
- ₹3,480 Cr collected from buyers; ₹2,960 Cr revenue recognised under Ind AS 115
- Net debt, March 2026
- ₹540 Cr
- Down from ₹1,920 Cr in March 2020; rated A by two agencies
- RERA-registered projects under construction
- 34
- Each with its own designated account, ledger and ninety-day cash floor
Decisions & consequences
01Drawing ₹310 crore less from project accounts than the certificates allowed
When I joined Mridvika in November 2019, its project withdrawals were lawful and certified, but they leaned forward. For multi-phase layouts the company had allocated most of the land cost to the first registered phases, so those phases could release land cost early as construction progressed. The cash released funded deposits on new land and interest on more than ₹2,200 crore of gross debt. It worked while buyers kept paying. I had watched the same habit stall projects I had lent to.
I proposed two changes: spread land cost across all phases by saleable area, and keep in every designated account a floor equal to the next ninety days of construction spending. Together they would cut what we could draw in 2020–21 by about ₹310 crore. Siddharth Kirtane, our managing director, accepted the principle but asked to phase it over two years. Our head of land disagreed outright, because a 14-acre parcel in Baner was being offered at a distressed price of ₹260 crore and the released cash was his funding plan. Then the lockdown began in March 2020, collections fell by 41 per cent in the first quarter and all nineteen sites closed.
The board adopted both changes from April 2020. We declined the Baner parcel, which another developer bought and launched profitably in 2022; that is the cost I think about most. We paid site wages and subcontractors' advances during the closure from the company's own free cash, not from buyers' money, and deferred two launches by six months.
Every site was working again by August 2020, funded from its own account. No project has needed a lender's top-up to finish since, and between 2021 and March 2026 we handed over 11,800 homes. Our lenders now receive the same monthly project ledgers as our board, and the rating agencies have cited project-level cash cover in each of our upgrades.
I would do two things differently. I would have explained the land-cost reallocation to the land and sales teams before taking it to the board, because they experienced it as a rule imposed on them from above. And I would have set a standing rule for funding land from free cash, so that a parcel like Baner was judged against a policy rather than argued case by case.
Replacing NBFC money at 13.8 per cent, and diluting the founder to do it
In March 2021 Mridvika's gross debt was ₹2,240 crore, of which ₹1,150 crore was construction finance from three NBFCs at an average of about 13.8 per cent. The loans were flexible: they funded land as well as construction and could be topped up quickly. They were also expensive, and after 2018 the NBFCs themselves were under pressure to shrink their developer exposure. One of the three was Anvayi Finance, where I had worked until 2019.
Banks would lend at around 9 to 10 per cent, but only for construction, against designated accounts and with a cash sweep that repaid debt from each project's surplus receipts. They also wanted a rating of A- or better, and our BBB+ needed a stronger balance sheet behind it. I recommended a ₹750 crore qualified institutions placement alongside the bank refinancing. That meant diluting the promoter group from 64 to 58 per cent. Madhav Kirtane opposed it: he had built the company without outside equity and saw dilution as a loss of control. Siddharth Kirtane worried that bank sweeps would leave nothing for land. Both were right about the costs.
I declared my former employment to the Audit Committee and stepped back from the negotiation with Anvayi, which the managing director led himself. The board approved the placement in January 2022, and it closed in February at ₹412 a share. We prepaid all three NBFCs by September 2022, paying ₹21 crore in prepayment charges, and moved construction finance on 14 projects to four banks.
Average borrowing cost fell from 12.6 per cent in 2019–20 to 10.1 per cent in 2022–23, even though the RBI began raising its policy rate in May 2022, and to 9.4 per cent in 2025–26. Finance costs in 2022–23 were ₹96 crore lower than in 2020–21. Our rating rose to A- in 2023 and to A in 2025. The cost appeared elsewhere: with banks unable to fund land, we paid for every acre from equity and internal cash, and our Bengaluru entry was smaller than planned.
I would keep one modest NBFC facility for land, priced and capped, instead of exiting all three lenders. And I would have given the founder a plainer account of what the dilution bought, in rupees of interest saved each year, rather than relying on the board to persuade him on my behalf.
Taking a promoter family's land deal to shareholders on different terms
In early 2023 Sahyagiri Estates LLP, a Kirtane family entity, proposed a joint development agreement for 18 acres it had owned in Tathawade since 2007. The plot adjoined two of our completed projects and could carry about 2.6 million square feet of homes. The family's proposal gave the landowner 45 per cent of the built area and a refundable deposit of ₹120 crore from Mridvika. The land was good and the family had held it patiently. The difficulty was that the people negotiating for both sides sat at the same dinner table.
I commissioned two valuations from valuers the Audit Committee selected, and compared the proposal with the eleven joint development agreements we had signed with unrelated landowners in west Pune since 2018. Area shares in those deals ranged from 32 to 40 per cent, and revenue shares from 30 to 36 per cent. An area share would also give the landowner flats to sell on its own account, possibly below our prices inside our own project. I recommended a 35 per cent revenue share, a deposit of ₹40 crore and a long-stop date after which the agreement would lapse if approvals were not in place.
Madhav Kirtane took the recommendation personally, and for some weeks our conversations were formal. The Audit Committee approved my terms. Because the expected payments to the LLP over the project's life made the transaction material under the SEBI Listing Regulations, it also needed shareholders' approval, and related parties could not vote in favour. Two proxy advisers recommended support after reading the valuations. The resolution passed in October 2023 with 91 per cent of the votes cast.
The delay cost us a launch season: the first phase opened in May 2024 rather than before Diwali 2023. It sold ₹610 crore in its first twelve months, and at current prices the revenue-share structure leaves the company about ₹180 crore better off over the project's life than the original proposal would have. In 2024 the Audit Committee adopted a standing policy for any promoter-group land transaction.
What I would change is the order. I would have proposed that policy before the family brought a parcel to the table, so that the debate was about principles rather than about their land and my judgement of it.
Offering 640 delayed buyers in Thane their money back before they asked
The second phase of our Kolshet project in Thane was registered under RERA with a possession date of December 2024. In 2022 we bought additional floor space for its towers, which required a revised environmental clearance. We expected it in six months; it took twenty. By mid-2024 it was clear that possession would slip by about eighteen months. We had sold 640 of the phase's 820 homes, and those buyers had paid us ₹410 crore.
Under section 18 of the RERA Act, a buyer whose possession is delayed may withdraw and recover the amount paid with interest, or stay and receive interest for every month of delay. Our head of sales wanted to keep buyers with upgrade offers and a discount on the final instalment. Our legal counsel thought the clearance delay could be argued as beyond our control. I argued that a delay caused by our own decision to add floors would not persuade a regulator, and that buyers who learnt of it from the site rather than from us would complain first and negotiate later.
The board agreed to write to all 640 buyers in July 2024, explaining the cause and offering a choice: a full refund with interest at the rate the Maharashtra rules prescribe, paid within thirty days of a request, or monthly delay interest credited each quarter until possession. 214 buyers chose refunds, costing ₹192 crore of principal and ₹31 crore of interest. Delay interest for the others has cost ₹24 crore so far. We funded the refunds from free cash rather than the project account, which postponed a Bengaluru land payment by a year.
Nine complaints were filed with MahaRERA, all settled without an adverse order. We resold the 214 homes in 2025–26 at prices about 11 per cent higher, for ₹268 crore. The occupancy certificate arrived in August 2026 and possession is now being offered. Every new project registration since 2024 includes a buffer for approvals we have not yet received.
I would have written to buyers six months earlier, when the clearance first slipped, instead of waiting until the new date was certain. Several of the buyers who left told us that an earlier letter would have kept them.