The International Finance Corporation is investing ₹225 crore in NDR Smart Spaces to boost India’s modern warehousing footprint, focusing on smaller cities and cold storage facilities to reduce post-harvest losses and create thousands of jobs.
The International Finance Corporation is putting ₹225 crore into NDR Smart Spaces in a move aimed at expanding India’s modern warehousing network into smaller cities and strengthening cold-chain capacity for temperature-sensitive goods. The company said the funding will support a development pipeline of about 20 million sq ft across 14 cities in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, including roughly 8 million sq ft already under construction.
According to the announcement, the planned portfolio will combine dry warehouses with cold storage facilities, with much of the work concentrated in tier II and tier III markets where organised logistics infrastructure remains limited. About 1.5 million sq ft of cold storage is planned, a scale the company says could help cut post-harvest losses and improve the movement of perishable cargo.
The IFC has already backed NDR’s warehousing platform in other forms. In December 2024, the lender said it had invested $75 million in NDR InvIT Trust to promote sustainable warehousing, including certification of existing assets under the EDGE efficiency standard, lower greenhouse gas emissions and reduced water use. In a separate December 2024 announcement, IFC said it had anchored the first sustainability-linked bond issued by the trust, tying financing to greener warehouse development.
The latest investment also builds on a broader capital inflow into NDR Warehousing. In July 2023, Investcorp completed a follow-on investment of ₹500 crore in the platform after an earlier $55 million commitment in 2022. At that point, the company said NDR had more than 14 million sq ft of operational assets across 10 cities and occupancy above 95%, underscoring investor confidence in India’s fast-growing warehousing sector.
NDR says the new pipeline could generate 24,000 direct jobs in logistics, operations, maintenance and management. The expansion reflects a wider shift in India’s warehouse market as demand rises beyond the biggest metropolitan centres and developers chase better supply chains for retail, manufacturing and agricultural trade.
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