MUMBAI, India -- Nikhil Gandhi's dream is to build an industrial park half the size of Singapore on the outskirts of this teeming seaside city, India's financial capital.

He's got a ways to go. Currently, the property contains miles of brush and a smattering of tiny farms, and not much else. It could "take 20 years to develop infrastructure" in India, he says. "So it's best to create 'islands' " such as this industrial park, where everything -- from electricity to the sewers -- works like it's supposed to, but rarely does here.

This massive project, and others Mr. Gandhi has launched, put him on the front lines of one of the most ambitious efforts to draw foreign investment in India's 59-year history. Last year, parliament approved the establishment of "special economic zones" or SEZs, or industrial enclaves intended to overcome one of India's biggest barriers to commerce: the crumbling infrastructure. Most ports are decades out of date, power is unreliable, and narrow roads teem with bullock carts.

The project also epitomizes the gold-rush mentality in Indian real estate. There are now hundreds of SEZs on the drawing board nationwide.

Mr. Gandhi, 46 years old, plays an unusual role in all of this. It's a role that could scarcely have existed just a decade ago, when India's socialist traditions meant there was little room for an entrepreneur to develop ports without government involvement.

He's also a reflection of an India eager to close the gap with neighboring China. In fact, SEZs are an idea borrowed directly from China, which used them in the 1990s ago to launch its own resurgence. Today, India draws only about one-tenth the foreign investment of China.

For the Mumbai development, Mr. Gandhi and his company, SKIL Infrastructure Ltd., lacked the deep pockets to execute on even a modest version of his scheme, which would cost a minimum of about $1.5 billion. So he teamed up with Mukesh Ambani, one of the two heirs to one of the country's most powerful conglomerates, Reliance Group.

It's been a rough road. Over the past decade, Mr. Gandhi has been a prime force in persuading the Indian government to allow the creation of SEZs. Now, his deep-pocketed partners are increasingly marginalizing him, even though the Mumbai project was his idea in the first place.

"The big boys wait for me to visualize something," he says. "I have conviction, and I make it happen. And when it happens, they call me a visionary -- and take everything away," Mr. Gandhi says.

"Nikhil Gandhi is a dreamer," says Anand Jain, who is in charge of the project for Reliance. "He can conceptualize a brilliant idea," but needs funding and organizational help to make it happen.

He is "a risk taker without resources," adds Deepak Parekh, chairman of Housing Development Finance Corp. Ltd., which has provided funding and advice for Mr. Gandhi over the years. "His projects are too large for his balance sheet."

Mr. Gandhi grew up as a self-described "wharf rat," hanging around the port in Kolkata (then known as Calcutta), in Western India, where his father had a small business making rain gear and tarpaulins. His first job, as a teenager, was traveling by train from Kolkata to Mumbai (then known as Bombay) to sell pan, a mildly addictive leaf-wrapped concoction that Indians are fond of chewing.

In time, he became a small contractor to the port of Bombay, supplying, for example, 80,000 brooms to the port. Eventually he built that business into a sizable enterprise and became actively involved in running the port itself. "I would see the cargo, and the warehouses and the cranes and it seemed so exciting."

Lining up funding for his current project took some work. Initially, Mr. Gandhi approached another blue-chip conglomerate, Tata Group. "Since they have so many group companies, I thought many could become users" of an SEZ, he recalls over tea in the exclusive Belvedere Club at the Oberoi Hotel on the Mumbai waterfront, facing the Arabian Sea.

Last year, however, he suddenly broke off talks with Tata and instead paired up with Reliance. Tata says it was doing due diligence to make sure the land procurement was above board when Mr. Gandhi ended the talks.

"He was knocking on the doors of many investors -- he approached every type of investor," says Mr. Jain of Reliance. He says Reliance plans to invest as much as $5 billion, far more than Mr. Gandhi could raise by himself. (That figure doesn't include any buildings or factories.)

None of this is a sure bet. The project still faces a perhaps-lengthy government-approval process and the messy business of acquiring the land from the farmers who now occupy it.

Indeed, his efforts to build an earlier port project, a decade ago at Pipavav in the western state of Gujarat, illustrate how tough it can be to raise funds for a project like this. Mr. Gandhi first had to borrow against the future port operations, and ultimately sell his stake -- losing control of that project as well.

There were long delays and both commercial and political difficulties. To overcome them, he brought in an array of minority investors, including the Port Authority of Singapore, Maersk, a Scandinavian shipping line, and New York Life. Currently, Maersk controls the port and is expanding it.

Today, Mr. Gandhi does not have much to show financially for all his endeavors. Still, now he's pushing ahead on a third, even newer, infrastructure project, a shipyard he now hopes to build in Gujarat.

It's another ambitious undertaking that he is starting from scratch. Recently, he hired a team of snake-charmers to help clear the jungle property of cobras.

"I don't believe in killing. I insist that the cobras are picked up alive," he says. A few minutes later, he adds quietly: "One day, the shipyard may be one of the largest in the world."