Ambuja Neotia Group, the Kolkata-headquartered business house built by Harshavardhan Neotia, has named the Indian Sundarbans as one of the locations for its next phase of hospitality expansion. Indian Hotels Company (IHCL) has entered into an agreement with Ambuja Neotia Group to develop 15 new hotels, an expansion that will increase their collaborative portfolio to over 40 hotels. These developments are spread across West Bengal, Sikkim and Himachal Pradesh and combine greenfield, brownfield and conversion projects. Among the named sites, the list includes a Taj resort in Sunderban, alongside properties in Darjeeling, Shimla and Rabong, with SeleQtions hotels in Kolkata and Siliguri and a Tree of Life in Lataguri.
The Sundarbans entry is described in the same announcement as part of a wider push into offbeat destinations such as Raichak, Sikkim, Shivpuri, and Lataguri, where branded residences are being built, alongside Rabong in Sikkim, and Sunderbans, famous for Bengal tigers and the mangrove forest areas in the Ganga Delta. This places the Sundarbans in the same investment conversation as the group's established hill and riverside circuits, rather than as an isolated one-off.
Ambuja Neotia's interest in the Sundarbans follows directly from how the group built its hospitality arm over nearly three decades. The Ffort, Raichak was a vision of Harshavardhan Neotia and opened in 1997 as a landmark in West Bengal, built on 65 acres of landscaped greenery against the Hooghly, on an old fort theme blending the contemporary with the medieval. It was the Group's debut in the hotel sector, featuring a luxury riverside resort with 112 elegantly designed rooms and suites, along with extensive conference and banquet facilities.
That property was later joined by a second, larger riverside asset on the same stretch of the Hooghly. Taj Ganga Kutir Resort & Spa, Raichak sits within a sprawling 100-acre estate and features 155 thoughtfully designed rooms and suites with a rustic charm, offering serene views of the Ganges. The pattern across both Raichak properties — a large landscaped estate, river frontage, banqueting scale for weddings and retreats, and a partnership with Taj for brand and operations — is the template the group is understood to be carrying into the Sundarbans, where water, mangrove and wildlife replace the Hooghly's open river views as the defining site asset.
The Sundarbans commitment sits inside a larger capital programme the group has laid out for the state. In 2024–25 the Group announced an ambitious ₹15,000 crore investment plan, unveiled at the Bengal Global Business Summit, covering five new hospitals adding 1,300 beds in West Bengal and a luxury hotel circuit with Taj spanning 600 rooms across Darjeeling, Digha, Sundarbans and other locations. That scale of commitment, spread across healthcare, hospitality and townships, is consistent with a group whose real estate arm traces back to a state-backed public-private housing mandate rather than a purely private developer model.
Ambuja Neotia's institutional weight in Bengal comes from decades of work that began well before hospitality. Under the stewardship of Harshavardhan Neotia, the group has been responsible for landmark projects in and around Kolkata, starting with Udayan, Kolkata's first condoville built on the Public-Private Partnership model, which made good living affordable for the first time in the country and earned Neotia the Padma Shri in 1999. That housing model — cross-subsidised units for low, middle and higher-income buyers on a single site — was later repeated in townships across Durgapur, Bardhaman and Siliguri, and its retail and business-park arm went on to build City Centre malls and IT campuses across the state. The Sundarbans resort plan extends that same eastern-India, state-partnership orientation into conservation tourism rather than housing or retail.
The Indian Sundarbans is not an ordinary hospitality catchment; it is a protected, tide-governed delta. The Sundarbans is the largest mangrove forest in the world, covering approximately 10,000 square kilometers across India and Bangladesh. Its Indian portion carries multiple layers of protection: it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a tiger reserve, and a designated biosphere reserve, and the forest can only be explored by licensed boat rather than by road-based safari, since the terrain is cut everywhere by tidal creeks and rivers. Any large-format hospitality investment here therefore has to work within forest-department permitting and a waterway-led guest experience — a very different operating model from a highway-fronted resort, and one that favours a developer already experienced in coordinating large estates with government bodies.
Connectivity into the Sundarbans is improving but remains a multi-leg journey, which is precisely why a full-service resort brand matters more here than in a drive-in destination. The shortest route distance to Godkhali port from Kolkata is 82 km, and 95 km from Kolkata Airport. Canning is the nearest railway station to the Sundarbans, situated about 29 km from Godkhali Port. State Highway 3 is the only highway inside Sundarbans National Park, running from Krishnanagar to Godkhali. Beyond the road-head, movement is by boat along the delta's channels, which is why an operator capable of managing jetties, launches and forest-office liaison — the same coordination skill the group has applied at its river-facing Raichak properties — is relevant to how a Sundarbans property would actually function day to day.
For anyone tracking Ambuja Neotia's expansion, the Sundarbans announcement should be read alongside the group's demonstrated pattern rather than in isolation: a Kolkata-based, Padma Shri-linked promoter with a multi-decade run of state-partnered housing, malls, business parks and now a 40-plus-hotel alliance with Taj, choosing the Sundarbans as one of its named greenfield sites in the current expansion cycle. The mangrove delta's UNESCO status, tiger reserve protections and waterway-only access mean any project here will be positioned as a conservation-tourism destination in the same family as the group's Raichak riverside resorts, rather than as a conventional residential or commercial launch.