If you are associated with one of India's leading housing finance institutions for more than three decades now and have been its Chairman for virtually half that tenure, you surely know a thing or two about the state of the Indian real estate market. Hence, when Deepak Parekh, Chairman of HDFC and the man we are referring to, spoke about the real estate scenario in the country in a wide ranging interview to a business news channel, we were all ears.

Mr. Parekh opined that the current pain for the Indian realty players in the industry was a rather short lived one and hence, they seemed to have forgotten the same and are again back to raising all kinds of money as well as increasing prices. However, he also observed that the market exists currently only for housing whereas there seems to be a glut of commercial property with very few takers.

Mr. Parekh also appeared critical of the sorry state of infrastructure in cities like Mumbai and added that rather than aspiring to become a Shanghai, the government needs to first focus on improving the standard of living of Mumbai citizens. “Let's go to the government and tell it that it should have a single-point agenda of improving the living standards of its people. Let's just forget about wanting to be an international financial centre,” is how he chose to put it across. We couldn't have agreed more.