This one isn't about a film or a celebrity. It's about a tiger reserve getting a five-star address.

The Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation has floated a Request for Proposal to bring in an independent expert, a project monitoring agency, to keep watch over upgrades at five of its flagship resorts. Tadoba, Mithbav, Mahabaleshwar, Matheran and Harihareshwar are all on the list.

The headline project is Tadoba. MTDC plans a brand-new five-star resort spread across 25 hectares at the wildlife site, which is already one of the state's busiest safari destinations. The concessionaire gets a 60-year run to operate it.

Everything here is being built under a design, build, finance, operate and transfer model, so private players put up the money and manage operations for decades while MTDC keeps ownership of the land. Mahabaleshwar's four-star resort has also been leased out for 60 years. The three-star properties at Matheran, Mithbav and Harihareshwar get shorter 30-year concessions.

So why the independent expert? Because five simultaneous PPP projects across four different terrains, forest, hill station, coast, coast again, is a lot to supervise from one desk in Mumbai. The expert's brief covers reviewing architectural drawings, running quarterly site inspections, enforcing quality benchmarks, tracking construction timelines and stepping in if MTDC and its concessionaires start disagreeing, which on projects this size, they usually do.

The monitoring contracts aren't uniform either. Matheran and Mithbav get 24 months of oversight, Harihareshwar 36, Mahabaleshwar 48, and Tadoba, the biggest build of the lot, 60 months.

MTDC isn't handing this job to just anyone. Bidding consultancies need an average annual turnover of at least Rs 10 crore across the last three financial years. And there's a conflict-of-interest clause built in: any firm that has already consulted for a concessionaire or contractor on one of these five projects is out of the running.

What happens next is the empanelment process itself, and then the real test, whether these upgrades actually land on schedule. Tadoba's five-star build alone carries a five-year monitoring window, which tells you how long MTDC expects construction to run. The tender timeline for shortlisting the expert hasn't been made public yet.