Broken stands at the race course. Picture by Bishwarup Dutta

The Royal Calcutta Turf Club (RCTC), which once controlled horse racing in British India from Burma to Iran, is looking to revive its sagging stakes and give the sport a new lease of life through a realty rapprochement.

The heritage club’s crumbling 11 Russell Street premises will be re-developed as a city social club with five-star guest rooms, in partnership with a “leading real-estate developer” on long-term operation lease.

“We have appointed a house committee (chaired by Naresh Kumar) to scrutinise and process the applications. We hope to pick our partner in the next two months and break ground by the middle of next year,” J.R. Mukherjee, CEO of the club, tells Metro.

Although the club management is not divulging the bidders’ roster yet, the realty buzz in town is that Emaar-MGF and the Westcourt-Goldman Sachs consortium are among those in fray.

Mukherjee stresses that the club will remain custodian of the 227-cottah campus, while income from the profit-sharing project will be used to pay off debts and resuscitate the race course, which has lost pole position to Hyderabad, Mumbai and Bangalore.

“The club has accumulated debts of Rs 10-15 crore, excluding interest chargeable (RCTC owes Rs 8-9 crore by way of taxes to the state), while the race course needs an immediate injection of at least Rs 50 crore to become sustainable again,” the CEO points out.

The elite club-cum-hospitality address planned by the present stewards” committee is quite similar to the city club project of the earlier panel chaired by late J.N. Sapru.

“The difference is that RCTC remains the owner of the land and we will be doing the development as a joint venture with a realty firm,” says Kishore Bhimani, on the present stewards’ body alongside Cyrus Madan, Sudipto Sarkar, S.S. Bala and P.C. Lall.

While the club’s membership has dwindled from 300-plus to a mere 125, with only 50-odd active members, live race days at the Maidan course are down from 90 to 100 days a year to a sorry 43-44 days. Hyderabad does around 70 live race days, while Mumbai clocks more than 60 days.

From over 2,500 horses, many of them owned by royal families and expats, the RCTC stable count is now a little over 300 horses. This is a sad commentary on an institution, which survived the racing depression of the early 1850s and the wartime threat to the stands and enclosures at the race course and also to its 11 Russell Street rendezvous.

“Unless we can increase our stake money, we won’t be able to bring back the leading trainers and owners to Calcutta. The Russell Street development should give the club that leeway,” hopes Bhimani. The city scene is now virtually a two-horse race, with MAM Ramaswamy and Dipak Khaitan owning most of the thoroughbreds between them.

The top priority for the club management is to reconstruct the East Stand and the Monsoon Stand (also referred to as the Second Enclosure), both lying abandoned as structurally unstable. The other three stands will then be repaired and reoriented.

“We need at least Rs 15 crore just to fix the stands, another Rs 7 crore to overhaul the stables and add more space. Then, there are the scoreboards, the bookmakers’ ring, the confectionery stalls, which all need to be refurbished, and more betting outposts created. At present, we struggle to meet even the running expenditure of over Rs 18 crore per annum,” laments Mukherjee.