I see that you said you wanted to start small and grow. I see you are in India so you might need a US rep but you can get into real estate with that and compound your money fairly quickly.

I started with $100K cash that my wife and I saved up over a few years.

We used that to get a hard money loan to flip a house. We had to put in like $30K and the lender put in the rest. Flipped the house, sold it, got the initial investment back plus another $30K.

We rinsed and repeated. Now we do real estate projects whenever we want and never come out of pocket.

Don't get me wrong, this is just what I did because I knew someone that did appraisals and they guided me on what to look for in house flipping.

I'm sure there are other ways to go about it, just saying what I personally have done.