Nita Ambani, founder and chairperson of Reliance Foundation, on Sunday announced the setting up of Nita Mukesh Ambani Anant Ashray, a township planned near Mumbai as a permanent home for children without families, elderly people and persons with disabilities. She broke ground at the site in Karjat.
The project is spread across approximately 100 acres and is designed to house more than 5,000 residents for life. Once caregivers, support staff and medical professionals are added, along with their families, the township is expected to support a community of about 15,000 people — meaning those who look after residents would form the bulk of the population.
Residents will be housed in small, family-style homes, with dedicated house parents and caregivers assigned to look after them. The township will be laid out as eight residential villages, each named after a river considered sacred in India.
Ambani said the project was, for her and her family, "a beginning very close to our hearts". She called it "a step towards building a loving home" for people with disabilities, children in need of a home and older people who want care and comfort.
She added that, as a mother, her "deepest hope" was that parents who had spent a lifetime worrying about who would care for their children once they were no longer there could "find peace" in the knowledge that the child would "always have a home" and "a family of their own".
Accounts of the launch varied in small ways: reports spelt the name of the initiative differently, and one described the event as the launch of a foundation. Both agreed on the essentials — the project's name, its location near Mumbai and its purpose as a permanent home. The emphasis was on permanence: residents would stay for life, with care built into the running of the settlement.
The groundbreaking in Karjat marked the formal start of the project, which remains at an early stage. The township has been conceived as a place where children without families, elderly people in search of support and persons with disabilities can live permanently, in homes grouped into small households under the care of house parents and support staff.
No construction timeline, cost estimate or funding arrangement was disclosed at the announcement, and it was not stated when the first residents would begin moving in. The foundation also did not spell out how the township would be run day to day, or who would meet its recurring costs once it is occupied.
(With inputs from media reports)