Ulwe : The Town I never knew I needed to know

Having grown up in Mumbai, I thought I knew this city of 18M+ people; As a kid growing up, I had walked, trudged, and explored many parts of this "maximum" city, but I am hard-pressed to recognize this city now.

This hit home to me when I suddenly realized that Ulwe (a town now a part of Navi Mumbai) will put Mumbai on a stage that will become part of the real estate lure of greater Mumbai soon.

There was a time growing up when Anushakti Nagar (BARC headquarters) was considered the furthest edge of town and you had to take a bridge from there to get to Vashi (then the new frontier) and then Nerul and then Belapur which one would imagine as the distant ghats.. a town after that is now Ulwe!

Why is Ulwe on my mind you ask?

For one, this is one of the endpoints of the newly opened 16 km+ bridge over the sea, called The Mumbai Trans Harbour Link, also called the Atal Setu, which is all the talk these days.

 It has cut short the travel time on a moderately easy traffic day from say Colaba to Ulwe from about 90 minutes to about 47 minutes, a savings of about 48% in time! The actual bridge crossing itself about 16Km takes only 20 minutes to navigate today!

But that isn’t the reason I chose to explore this place. Ulwe is now home to Jio Institute, a sprawling campus of 90 acres, a fledgling school of varied and what feels like a hodge podge of postgraduate curriculums; They have programs in areas as diverse as AI and Data Sciences on the one end to Digital Media and Marketing Communications on the other with Sports Management being the newest addition to their portfolio.

In three short years, the campus has taken root, and with a state-of-the-art campus, complete with residential facilities for 150+ students,  (dorms that outdo the dorms my daughters had at UC and Stanford), visiting faculty and dignitaries.

All of this of course envisioned and brought to life by none other than, my good friend, and classmate but more importantly Provost of Jio Institute Dr. G Ravichandran.  He rightly will - with his now defacto humility -  point to others, including my host Dr. Nilay Yajnik who brought this to life but I can’t imagine this happening without his steady hands on the wheel.

I had been quizzing Ravi every visit I made to India these last couple of years as to what he was building here and he simply said  - come see for yourself - and with his understated humor used to say, "I can tell you anything I want to, but you will have to see it for yourself to understand"

Ravi invited me to come to visit him on this trip and I finally accepted. I got the grand tour. And Boy, was I impressed!

I got to see the residential campus, the classrooms,

the library,

The research rooms and Labs;

But, what blew me away is that this 90-acre campus is dwarfed by a 300-acre campus coming up nearby that will house a full-fledged university to rival any University of California campus including individual schools of Law, Medicine, Engineering, and Humanities!

The program curricula (a year-long duration) has been curated with extreme prejudice by top-notch faculty and deans from across the globe hand-selected by Ravi himself and enticed visiting faculty to come and teach short courses of 6-8 week durations on campus - luminaries in their field as academics or industry veterans.

The campus boasts complete soundproof rooms to capture (film) “studio” quality digital media - think green room - and behind-the-scenes editing and post-processing facilities.

As part of the whole Digital transformation, they are also teaching young kids the underpinnings of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality with labs and green rooms to create your own individual holograms and avatars - preparing for the Web3.0 wave that will surely explode in the coming years.

And for the sports-hungry nation, world-class training facilities for track and field, as well as gymnasiums with resident trainers prepare the next generation of athletes to compete on the world stage.

In this short span, the school has graduated three cohorts of Data Scientists and will graduate the first crop of Sports Managment graduates this year.

Admissions for 60 seats in the first two disciplines are on par with the most discriminating Ivy leagues. Criteria include undergraduate degrees, statement of purpose, GRE/GMAT/CAT/Gate, and a personal interview. Deserving candidates are even offered scholarships!

The price of admission for the tour ( I say this rather tongue in cheek!) was an hour-long seminar I delivered on Innovation Lessons from the Silicon Valley, lessons I have learned firsthand hand over the 40 years in the middle of that cauldron;

The faculty and research scholars who attended, came with a marked air of understanding of the topics and a healthy dose of skepticism that anything I could say would faze them and I welcomed the interactive session and Q&A to dig behind the sound bites to understand the points I was making.

But most of all, it was great catching up with an old friend!

In conclusion, to circle back to Ulwe, once you realize that the new DB Patil International Aiport (scheduled to be opened in 2025) is going to be 15 minutes from Ulwe, you can see why the aha moment happened that Ulwe is going to be much-desired address soon and why real estate in this corner of Mumbai is likely to skyrocket!