An elevator that can carry 200 people at the same time? Reliance Industries has installed the world’s largest passenger elevator at the Jio World Centre (JWC) in the heart of Mumbai city at 25.78 square meter of space. To put it into context, the average size of a one bedroom flat in Mumbai is about 30 square meter.

The elevator, built by Finnish company Kone, took six years of planning. Rajmal Nahar, President, Real Estate Projects, Reliance Industries, said it was the company’s endeavor to create a buzz in the world about JWC. “We wanted to create a monument that is not only a post card for Mumbai but for India. Mumbai is an international hub. We wanted to offer a world-class experience to those who landed in India. We have a phase-wise opening with the Jio Drive, the Fountain,” he said.

Jio World Centre is spread over 18.5 acres. This elevator is the centrepiece of this state-of-the-art facility. JWC is also the proud owner of the largest banquet hall as well, “and it’s no fun for just a handful of people from a baraat to enter in one go”, Nahar quipped.

This engineering marvel and all the 188 elevators at JWC have been installed by Kone elevators. Amit Gossain, Managing Director, KONE Elevators, told BusinessLine that it was planned for six years before the installation. While Gossain did not disclose the capex to install the big elevator, he said it was a multi-crore project.

There were four simple briefs that Reliance wanted — “safe, swift, state-of-the-art and elegant” — Gossain explained. He said “Reliance was clear on the fact that safety was important. It had also said that the flow of people shouldn’t stop and, lastly, it had to be elegant.”

When asked about the difficulties while implementing a project of this scale, he explained “that the machine that carries the elevator is usually retrofitted on top of the elevator. However, in this case, it has been retrofitted at the bottom of the elevator. The machine itself is larger than the elevator itself. We had implemented a similar scale project in London, so we had the experience to handle the scale and size. However, we had to work around the climate conditions in India in order to make the elevator efficient for Indian weather conditions”.

While the world’s first passenger service elevator was installed in a five-story hotel on Broadway in New York in 1857, India got its first elevator almost 40 years later at the Raj Bhavan in Kolkata in 1892. Now, almost 222 years later, India has the world’s biggest passenger elevator.