What in a few years will be India’s largest shopping mall today is a kilometre-long, three-storey deep hole in the earth marked with a billboard the size of a tennis court.

By 2010, the “Mall of India”, in what is now the dusty New Delhi satellite city of Gurgaon, will comprise 4.5m square feet of gleaming retail space, more than double the size of the biggest existing mall in India. It will boast 9,000 parking spaces and be ­connected to the New Delhi metro by its own light rail system, the first of its kind in the country.