Chairman, Merlin Group | Director, South City Group of Companies
There's a particular kind of conviction it takes to walk away from a family's established business and bet on an industry with no proven track record. In the early 1980s, that's exactly what Sushil Mohta did, and more than four decades later, the Merlin Group he built from that decision stands as one of Kolkata's most recognisable names in real estate.
Born into a Marwari family in Kolkata, Mohta grew up idolising his father, a self-made man whose values shaped his own approach to business long before he had a business of his own. He completed his education at St. Xavier's, Kolkata, and by the age of seventeen was already working alongside his father in the family's ball bearings business, absorbing lessons in people management and commercial discipline that would later prove far more transferable than anyone might have expected.
An unlikely pivot into real estate
Real estate wasn't the obvious next step. The family's roots were in manufacturing, and in the early 1980s, property development in India was still an emerging, unproven market rather than the investment-grade sector it is today. Mohta saw the opportunity anyway, founding what would become Merlin Group in 1984, with the Merlin brand itself taking shape around 1990 after several years of groundwork.
That early willingness to back a market others hadn't yet priced in has remained something of a signature. Decades later, he'd apply the same instinct to Kolkata itself, describing the city's current infrastructure push as having been real estate's best-kept secret for years, only now catching up with its underlying fundamentals.
From housing to a diversified portfolio
What began as a residential-focused business has since grown into a diversified real estate group spanning commercial complexes, malls, townships, hospitality and mixed-use developments. Mohta has been closely involved in shaping the group's expansion into specialty retail through developments like Homeland Mall, hybrid office-retail spaces such as Acropolis, and hospitality ventures including the Ibiza resorts and Princeton Club.
He sits on the boards of two of Kolkata's most prominent malls, South City and Acropolis, and has played a central role in South City Projects, one of the city's flagship township developments. That project's ambitions eventually crossed borders entirely, extending the South City brand to Colombo with South City Altair, a 68-storey tower designed by Moshe Safdie, the architect behind Marina Bay Sands.
More recently, Merlin Group entered into a partnership with the World Trade Centers Association to develop a 3.5 million square foot World Trade Centre in Kolkata's Salt Lake Sector V, a project that reflects the scale the group now operates at, one built steadily over four decades rather than arriving overnight.
A voice for the industry, not just the company
Mohta's influence extends beyond Merlin Group itself. He's a founder member of CREDAI India, the umbrella body for India's real estate industry, and currently serves as President of CREDAI West Bengal. In that capacity, he has sat on various West Bengal government committees involved in shaping real estate policy, reform and legislation, work that has positioned him as much as an industry statesman as a developer.
He continues to make the case publicly for Kolkata's emergence as a serious real estate destination, pointing to metro expansion, land reform and rising demand for premium spaces as signs that the city is, in his words, at the cusp of a historic real estate renaissance.
Building for the next generation
Today, Merlin Group's leadership includes the next generation of the Mohta family, with his son Saket Mohta serving as Managing Director, steering the business alongside him. It's a continuation of the same intergenerational pattern that shaped Mohta's own start, learning the business from the ground up, then having the conviction to take it somewhere new.
Under the banner "A Home for Every Indian," Merlin Group's guiding vision has stayed consistent even as its ambitions have scaled from Kolkata townships to international towers. For Sushil Mohta, the throughline across four decades has never really been about buildings. It's been about recognising a market's potential before everyone else does, and having the patience to build for it properly.