Kolkata to get Rs 500 crore for one million square feet IT park

Kolkata : West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee on Wednesday laid the foundation store for a one million square feet IT park here, expected to be completed over the next 5 years at an investment of about Rs 500 crore.

Located at Nonadanga, on the outskirts of the city, the East Kolkata IT park will be shared by three investors- Rolta India, HSBC Electronic Data Processing, and HCL Infosystems- each of whom have been allotted 5, 3.5 and 1.5 acres respectively.

?This IT park is set to create about 10,000 jobs directly and is yet another sign of the commitment we have towards the development of the state,? said the chief minister.

?I have to admit that we were late starters for the information technology race. Our IT policies were formed sometime in 2002-03. Yet I am very happy that we have made such great progress as establishing ourselves as one of the key players of the field,? he said.

Officials of the Department of IT said that the centres to be set up by Rolta and HSBC were among the first to be set up outside their base states of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh.

Rolta, headquartered in Mumbai, is a specialised software services and development company with a presence in over 40 countries, which provides geospatial, defence and security, design and engineering and enterprise IT solutions.

K K Singh, chairman of the company said that besides a delivery centre, they are going to create a research and development unit here, which would be only the third one in the country, at a total investment of Rs 250 crore over the next 5 years.

?We are from a very talent oriented company, so we have to go where the talent is. A great presentation a few years ago by the state government convinced us that this was where we wanted to set up this unit,? said Singh.

HCL said that they were looking to strengthen their presence in the state with the unit here and set up their regional headquarters and a Centre for Excellence in the park that will provide skill development facilities and operational labs.

Minister of IT for West Bengal Debesh Das said the park was a key milestone in the progress of the state?s industrial development and would create 50,000 indirect jobs apart from the 10,000 direct ones.

?Despite a perception of slow progress in the state, the fact is that last year when the performance of almost every IT hub went low, Kolkata and Noida were the only two centres that had a positive growth. There were no pink slips here,? Das said.