"A Home for Every Indian"
Sushil Kumar Mohta
Founder, Chairman and Managing Director, Merlin Group
Sushil Mohta was born into a Marwari family in Kolkata, a community long associated with trade and enterprise across eastern India. His father ran a ball-bearings business, and Mohta, by his own account, idolized him as a self-made man who built his trade through discipline and hard work rather than inherited advantage. That early example of quiet perseverance would shape the way Mohta approached his own, very different career decades later.
He completed his schooling at St. Xavier's in Kolkata, one of the city's most respected institutions, and at the age of seventeen he began working alongside his father in the family business rather than proceeding directly to further study. In those early years he absorbed the fundamentals of commerce and people management that would prove essential once he eventually struck out on his own. His formal grounding in business was later deepened through university study of the hospitality trade, including research work on housing, urban development, and the economics of shopping-center design, a somewhat unusual academic path for someone who would go on to build his name in large-scale property development.
Ball bearings, however, were not where Mohta's ambitions lay. Real estate in India in the 1980s was neither glamorous nor widely regarded as a promising field, lacking the scale, financing, and institutional respect it enjoys today. Even so, Mohta saw potential where others did not, and around 1990 he founded the Merlin brand, building on groundwork the wider business had been laying since 1984. It was an unconventional pivot for a family rooted in manufacturing, and by Mohta's own account there was no turning back once he made the decision.
Under his leadership, Merlin Group grew from a housing-focused developer into one of eastern India's most diversified real estate conglomerates, with a portfolio spanning residential colonies, commercial and IT office buildings, industrial estates, and hospitality ventures. The group states it has delivered more than ten million square feet of developed space over the decades, and its footprint has extended well beyond Kolkata to cities including Chennai, Pune, Ahmedabad, and Bhubaneswar, as well as an international presence in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Mohta was an early mover in several real estate categories that were still novel in the Indian market. Merlin Group developed Homeland Mall in Kolkata as one of the city's pioneering specialty shopping centers, and later built Acropolis, a hybrid office and retail complex that helped popularize mixed-use development in the city. On the hospitality side, the group built getaway resorts such as Ibiza and created new-generation social and recreational spaces including the Princeton Club in Kolkata's Rabindra Sarobar area, a venue that has hosted corporate conferences, product launches, and press events for the city's business community over the years.
Mohta has also been a key figure in South City Projects (Kolkata) Ltd, serving as Director alongside his Merlin Group chairmanship. South City became Kolkata's showcase township development, combining large-scale residential towers with retail and civic amenities, and the brand was later extended internationally through South City Altair in Colombo, a sixty-eight-story tower designed by the renowned architect Moshe Safdie, best known internationally for Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. Mohta also sits on the boards of two of Kolkata's most prominent malls, South City and Acropolis.
In 2023, Merlin Group entered into a partnership with the World Trade Centers Association to develop a World Trade Center in Kolkata's Salt Lake Sector V, spanning roughly 3.5 million square feet on a 10.5-acre plot within the Nabadiganta Industrial Township Authority area. The license agreement was signed by Mohta alongside Scott Wang, Vice President of the World Trade Centers Association's Asia Pacific region, and by Saket Mohta, the Merlin Group's Managing Director and a member of the family's next generation now active in the business.
Beyond his own company, Mohta has played a prominent institutional role in shaping India's real estate industry. He is a founder member of CREDAI India, the umbrella body representing real estate developers nationally, and currently serves as President of CREDAI West Bengal. In that capacity he has sat on numerous government committees in West Bengal involved in policy making, regulatory reform, and legislation affecting the real estate sector, giving him a voice in shaping the rules of an industry he has spent more than three decades building within.
In recent public remarks, Mohta has turned his attention to what he describes as Kolkata's emerging moment as a real estate hotspot, pointing to new metro line expansions, land reforms, and the proposed 2,000-acre Kalyani greenfield airport near the city's northern periphery as signs of a coming transformation. He has argued that Kolkata's potential went underappreciated for years while other Indian metros dominated investor attention, and that a convergence of infrastructure investment and policy reform is now positioning the city for substantial growth.
Sushil Mohta, Merlin Group
Today, Sushil Mohta continues to lead the Merlin Group as its Chairman and Managing Director, overseeing a business that has grown from a single pivot away from the family's traditional trade into one of eastern India's most recognized real estate names, while his son Saket Mohta takes an increasingly visible role in the company's next phase of expansion, both within India and internationally.
