There are places built with money.
And there are places built with vision.
ND Studio in Karjat, just a 90-minute drive from Mumbai, was built with vision.
Founded by the late Nitin Chandrakant Desai, it was never meant to be just another shooting location. It was imagined as a living archive of Indian storytelling. A place where cinema, history, craft, and imagination could coexist. Today, that vision lies neglected and underused. Not because it failed, but because we failed it.
Maharashtra Film, Stage and Cultural Development Corporation (MFSCDCL) took over the operations in late 2024. It is envisaged as an extension of Film City Mumbai, and on paper, there have been plans to introduce new facilities. On paper.
Created picture- not real image.
Nitin Chandrakant Desai: The Man Behind the Dream
Nitin Desai was not merely a production designer or an art director. He was an institution. A brilliant set designer who brought the reel life to life.
A four-time National Film Award winner, he redefined scale and authenticity in Indian cinema. From Lagaan to Jodhaa Akbar, Devdas to Bajirao Mastani, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam to Khamoshi, his sets were not backdrops; they were authentic characters in their own right. He worked across formats with filmmakers like Ashutosh Gowariker, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, and Prakash Jha, shaping cinema across film, television, and later OTT platforms.
ND Studio was his most ambitious canvas.
Spread across 47 acres, it housed permanent sets of palaces, forts, villages, and streetscapes used for films, web series, television shows, advertisements, and international projects. ND STUDIO, in its prime, was the backbone of India’s visual storytelling economy.
And today, it shouts of negligence and ill-maintained space.
A Legacy in Shambles
Visiting ND Studio now is unsettling.
Ill-maintained sets.
Broken pathways.
Neglected structures.
Bare-minimum facilities.
No guided storytelling.
No immersive experience.
What is offered is a self-tour through decay.
I speak from experience. I have spent a night at the studio. It’s different that I had booked for two nights, but left after one. The place felt dry and eerie. Hardly any other guests. No room service. Poor upkeep. Silence where there should have been energy. That was not what one expects from a space that once stood at the heart of cinematic imagination.
It was this experience that forced me to look back and write this.
At ₹500 an entry ticket, visitors are paying to walk past tired sets and loosely recall scenes from films they once loved. That is not nostalgia. It was neglect dressed up as heritage.
If this is being called a “theme park,” it fails at the most basic promise of one: experience.
A Theme Park Without Experience Is a Cemetery
Seeing sets is not enough.
Audiences have changed. Instagram, Reels, immersive travel, and experiential tourism have changed people. They want an immersive experience; they want to step into the cinema, not walk around it. ND STUDIO can give all that. However, what ND Studio offers today feels like an abandoned museum with no curator.
No live shows.
No re-enactments.
Neither is an action sequence.
Nor workshops.
Forget storytelling guides.
to explain the behind-the-scenes magic.
Cinema is movement, sound, drama, emotion.
Silence and neglect kill it.
The Missed Opportunity
This is not a dead asset.
This is a sleeping giant.
ND Studio can easily become a 2–3 day immersive cinema destination. The Bollywood-obsessed audience would lap it up. It has to be a trip worth remembering and sharing.
Curated guided tours led by storytellers.
Live stunt and action shows like Singapore.
Costume and role-play experiences.
Workshops in acting, cinematography, and art direction.
Night shows with projection mapping.
Film screenings inside original sets.
Reels-first zones for creators.
Tie-ups with film schools, OTT platforms, and tourism boards.
Package it as a cinema experience retreat and stop treating it as a half-hearted sightseeing stop. This is not fantasy. This is something that is immensely possible.
Revival Needs Courage
Sentiment and apparent government apathy will not save this place.
ND Studio needs serious private participation. It needs creative custodians who understand experience, storytelling, and sustainability. Because heritage and legacy do not survive on reverence alone. It survives on relevance.
ND Studio today is a metaphor for how India treats its creative visionaries: it celebrates them loudly while abandoning their institutions quietly.
It must change.
The space exists.
The legacy exists.
What’s missing is intent.
And intent, unlike legacy, can still be created.
Let’s stop doing a disservice to cinema.
Let’s stop neglecting a visionary’s life’s work.
And finally turn ND Studio into what it was always meant to be.
A living, breathing celebration of Indian storytelling.
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NITIN CHANDRAKANT DESAI- MORE ON HIM.
We learned of Nitin Chandrakant Desai’s death during our discussion, and it was deeply unsettling.
In July 2023, Desai was found dead at ND Studio, in a case officially recorded as suicide. A man who spent his life building worlds for others seemed to have run out of space for himself. Reports at the time pointed to acute financial stress, mounting debt, and the emotional weight that often accompanies large, vision-led enterprises when support systems falter.
Beyond this, much has been said and speculated. There are unsubstantiated rumours of personal disappointment, fractured relationships, and isolation. What is clear is this: a visionary felt cornered, unheard, and alone in his last days.
His passing was a warning signal to anyone who believes vision alone is enough.
In India, we applaud ambition when it succeeds, but we rarely build safety nets when it struggles.
Today, cinema is changing rapidly. The awe of filmmaking, the reel-life-feel-real magic, is decreasing. The distance between illusion and reality has collapsed.
I belong to a generation that grew up when cinema still felt sacred, and when the sets were an integral part of the whole process; they mattered, scale mattered, and when walking into a crafted world or seeing your favourite stars on screen could still take your breath away. Nitin Desai crafted many such moments for us. His work gave physical form to imagination.
That is why ND Studio still matters to an outsider like me.
To me, it is not a relic of the past but a space that can offer an authentic experience in an age of shortcuts. The future of ND studio does not lie in preserving tired sets, but in re-imagining the legacy. Giving the audience an immersive performance, learning, with active engagement and participation.
If we truly wish to honour Nitin Desai, the answer is not silence or neglect.
The answer is revival with intent.
Because legacies do not survive by standing still.
They survive when we let them evolve over time.
