Ashwin Kumar

For more than two decades, Bengaluru weekends have stayed the same. Hundreds and thousands of IT professionals and corporate employees braved the congestion on Silk Board or Mysore Road to find refuge in the concrete cookie-cutter resorts in Kanakapura, Electronic City or Nandi Hills.

But recently, especially in the wake of post-pandemic urban exhaustion, the economy of leisure in the city has undergone a big change. The formula of passive consumption of hospitality services has lost its shine. Instead, an organic trend is taking root in the green belts around the city: that of the managed farm estates.

The idea combines the ease of living and ownership of property. These estates also allow people to enjoy being in nature — with its expansive space, silence, and fresh air — without having to renounce their occupations.

Every weekend, rather than standing in line for breakfast in hotels, families are heading down the highway to their own plot of 400 sq.m. in locations such as Sakleshpur, Kanakapura, Chikkaballapur, or Denkanikottai.

Ground realities

The weekends are now opportunities for ‘active participation’, through hands-on therapeutic interaction with the land.

Hands-on agri-therapy: Activities such as pruning mango trees, harvesting organic vegetables and monitoring drip irrigation system have become the new ways of relaxing.Parents whose weekdays were spent deploying software solutions or making pitches can now be found instructing their children about fruit farms.

Living off the land: People prefer eating organic food such as spinach, tomato and native herbs that are grown on the land.

Back to nature: Bio-ponds are often part of the estate, with fruit trees and native species such as teak and sandalwood planted alongside. Stargazing decks are also built nearby in order to have minimum footprint on the environment.

Key drivers

There have been a number of key economic, legal, and demographic drivers for this trend in Karnataka:

Favorable regulatory scenario: A key catalyst is the landmark amendment to the Karnataka Land Reforms Act in 2025 that removed the barriers for non-agriculturists buying agricultural land. The legal change helped tap into a large pool of urban capital where working professionals and High Net Worth Individuals (HNIs) were able to legally purchase farmland without having to go through complicated historical land use processes.

Sunk cost of resort leisure: Spending ₹15,000 to ₹25,000 per weekend at a luxury resort is a sunk cost (which cannot be recovered). However, managed farm estates offer the dual benefit of a lifestyle amenity and asset creation.

Farming outputs and tax savings: Apart from gaining value in the real estate, managed farms can earn additional revenue from planting and harvesting long-term timber produce (such as teak, silver oak, or mahogany) or seasonal crop produce (such as mangoes, coconuts, and guavas).

Old-age or established orchards of mangoes, for example, can have revenues ranging between ₹2 lakh and ₹6 lakh per acre on an annual basis.

Short stay revenue model: For owners who may not be able to stay at their weekend farmhouses often, managed farmhouses are becoming popular via short-stay platforms such as boutique homestays.

The quest for safe and open spaces has gradually evolved into a permanent lifestyle transformation for the urban Bengaluru population. The economy during weekends is not based on escape anymore but rather a sense of permanence and rootedness. Moreover, with more and more developments taking place in the form of better periphery ring road infrastructure, highway networks, and satellite towns, the commute time to the agricultural periphery is also reducing every day.

The writer is founder & managing director of Vibez Estates.