India’s skyline is changing dramatically. New ropeways — or aerial tramways — are coming up all over the country. Betting big on this form of ‘sustainable mobility’ is FIL Industries, one of the companies behind the ambitious Dehradun-Mussoorie ropeway project that aims to cut travel time between the two towns to just 20 minutes (from nearly 90 minutes by road).

FIL, set up by a Kashmiri entrepreneur, is part of the Mussoorie Sky Car Private Ltd consortium, along with French giant POMA and SRM Engineering LLP, which is building the cable car project, with the first leg expected to be ready by September 2026.

Syed Junaid Altaf, Group Executive Director, FIL Industries, points to how ropeway infrastructure — long associated with pilgrim places or tourist hotspots in hilly areas — is now finding a new direction, as a means to decongest commutes, making for an exciting opportunity for new players. Take, for instance, the Kashi ropeway project in Varanasi to connect Banaras Cantt Railway Station to Godowlia Chowk, perhaps the first use case of a cable car inside a crowded city.

“There is a boom in terms of announcements in the ropeway space. In this decade, India will see three times the number of ropeways, compared to the first 75 years after Independence,” declares Junaid. Indeed, the National Highway Logistics Management Ltd has recently awarded five ropeway projects and initiated feasibility studies for 16 more.

Significantly, the FIL-POMA-SRM consortium has also secured the Yamunotri ropeway project, spanning 3.8 km between pilgrim site Yamunotri and Kharsali in Uttarakhand.

Zipping in

It was in 2014 that FIL Industries, which operates the 2.8-km-long Skyview by Empyrean — the highest ropeway in India in terms of ground clearance — at Sanget–Patnitop, in Jammu and Kashmir, entered the aerial tramway business.

And it entered holistically, offering F&B, hospitality, retail and other allied services that are intrinsic to ropeway projects. Patnitop, for instance, is a full destination management project including rooms, food, retail, and adventure tourism activities. “We invested in the architecture and the entire experience around. When you are developing an industry, these are things that matter,” he says. The Dehradun-Mussoorie project will also see retail, entertainment, and a host of other activities.

“Till 2014, we were primarily in the agricultural space,” says Junaid, describing how FIL Industries, set up by his father in 1989, started as a trader of agro chemicals, got into manufacturing, and then agri services. “A sense of business came to the family because my grandparents had six kids and the salary of my grandfather (he was the first matriculate in his village and a government employee) wasn’t enough to support the family. So they bought a piece of land and started cultivating, and my father studied agriculture and entered the agri business,” he says.

With pride, Junaid describes how his father was good at integrating various lines of the agri business. He himself has incubated and developed new business lines in horticulture through FILAVAL Nursery Private Limited, bringing in the first foreign direct investment in the space in J&K through a joint venture with French player Dalival, one of the largest stone fruit nurseries in Europe.

In 2014, a chance meeting with someone from POMA triggered interest in ropeways.

“At that time there were not too many ropeway operators in India and, given my love for skiing, my interest was aroused,” says Junaid. Plus, he says, they wanted to get into an area where there were large entry barriers, and have to be built through partnerships, thereby attracting only serious players.

“Next 18 months, I learned a lot about the business and, simultaneously, we were looking at identifying areas in India where these could be built, and we submitted seven or eight proposals to the government. In 2016, there was a global tender for Patnitop — we put in the bid and won,” says Junaid, describing how building the ropeway end-to-end in two years and four months was a record of sorts and a testament to the strong Indo-French collaboration.

Not a smooth ride

But it was by no means a smooth takeoff. On July 20, 2019 the ropeway project at Patnitop, the first infrastructure venture of the company, was inaugurated. On August 5, Article 370 was removed, and everything shut down in J&K. In 2020, Covid happened. “We reopened only after that, but now we employ more than 150 people and it is one of the largest investments in tourism in J&K,” says Junaid, who adds that the group invested about ₹150 crore.

What was a sleepy hollow until 2018, has now become a thriving tourist destination. With nearby Katra, the stop for Vaishno Devi, attracting 2 million tourists a year, Patnitop naturally benefited.

But even as Patnitop was beginning to boom, Operation Sindoor cast a shadow. “The immediate effect was the cancelling of more than 50 per cent of room bookings, along with substantially fewer footfall for the ropeway,” says Junaid. There has been an uptick in bookings for June, so he expects normalcy to return in a couple of months.

But he is philosophical. Such projects, especially when developing a new ecosystem, require at least 10 years for payback, he says.

Even as he talks about the growing opportunity in the space, he is aware of the challenges involved in building the infra, and so FIL is also thinking of becoming a specialised operating company. The larger goal, he says, is to put India on the global map as a hub for an advanced, fast, safe, and eco-friendly ropeway system.

Published on June 8, 2025

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