MUMBAI, India — The units in an apartment building being built in the upscale Mumbai neighborhood of Juhu promised to be both dazzling and odd: Each of the 33 homes in the 11-story building would come with a private lily pond, a car elevator and parking spaces for three cars next to the living room.

City officials and neighborhood residents say the parking spaces were a clever sham dreamed up by a developer and corrupt bureaucrats to skirt building rules and avoid paying millions of dollars in fees. The rooms for “parking,” which the developer did not have to account for because they were not considered living spaces, were sold to buyers as a way to add dining areas, extra rooms or whatever else they wanted.

The building, which remains empty awaiting the resolution of a legal case now at the Indian Supreme Court, is just one of scores of tainted real estate projects that analysts say have exposed a deep-rooted culture of corruption here in India’s financial capital. In recent years, when construction was booming along with the Indian economy, Mumbai, the nation’s most densely populated city, may have lost potential revenue of as much as 200 billion rupees, or $3.6 billion, a year because of such violations, said Subodh Kumar, Mumbai’s former city commissioner, the Indian equivalent of an American city manager.

“One thousand square feet became 2,000 or 3,000 depending on how well you could work the system,” said Mr. Kumar, who retired this year. “There was a huge industry of corruption.”