Centre accords co-developer status to Wipro at Infocity SEZ

The Board of Approval (BoA) under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry approved the proposal of IT major Wipro to co-develop a portion of the IT (information technology)/ITes(enabled services) Special Economic Zone (SEZ) at Infocity, which is being developed by the Odisha Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation (Idco).

Wipro will develop 26 acres of land allotted to it in the 69.15 hectare sector specific SEZ. Apart from site development, it will set up software development office building, among others.

A co-developer of SEZ usually comes in after the initial promoter, in this case Idco, starts work on the zone and brings in much-needed investments.

The state government had approved the proposal of the IT Company before it was forwarded to the Board of Approval, said an official. The approval of co-developer status to the IT behemoth will help it to expand its Bhubaneswar project.

Recently, after a stern warning from the state government to take back the land allotted to the company at a prime location in the city due to delay in project implementation, Wipro had committed massive expansion for its Odisha project, promising employment of 28000 IT professionals at its city facility over next few years.

Wipro had also mentioned that it has approached the Centre for approval to be the co-developer of the IT SEZ.

"The teams have worked out a detailed engineering plan for the next phase. On receipt of the SEZ approval, we will apply for building plan approval with the state government and begin the construction for 4,000 employees immediately on obtaining the permission. The centre is planned for 28,000 employees with 2.8 million square feet of built-up space," T K Kurien, chief executive officer of Wipro, had said in the letter to Odisha's IT minister Pranab Prakash Das.

Wipro is likely to add 1000 employees to its development centre here, over and above its current headcount of around 200 within a span of two-three months.

The state government, in 2005, had allotted the land to Wipro in Infocity. The original plan was to construct five towers, which would house 11,000 technical associates. Although Wipro commenced construction in 2007, it had gone slow on the work and lagged its peers Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Tech Mahindra, which have set up full-fledged campuses in the city.