Cognizant to invest Rs 200 crore in second phase expansion

The additional space will house 4,800 IT professionals. The company already employs over 8,000 people in the state.

When on Friday, Cognizant Technologies unveiled its plans to start work on the second phase of its Bantala campus, the third largest information technology (IT) company in the country, gave further weight to an industry which is on steady rise in West Bengal.

In the second phase of addition in space, Cognizant will add 554,000 square feet, at a cost of Rs 200 crore. When completed, the additional space will house 4,800 IT professionals. The company already employs over 8,000 people in the state. Just the Bantala facility, when completed will employ 16,000 people.

According to R Chandrasekaran, President and Managing Director, Global Delivery, Cognizant, the Kolkata operations continue to be a priority centre for the larger scheme of growth plans that the company has.

“The Kolkata center is an important part of our integrated global delivery capability and our continued success in winning the war for talent to support our ever expanding range of services, industries, and geographies. We look forward to growing our infrastructure and operations in the city,” he said.

The announcement of the new set of plans for Cognizant comes at a time when over the past month and half, the city’s otherwise stagnant industry scene has witnessed visits from Azim Premji of Wipro, N Chandrasekaran of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), and S Gopalakrishnan of Infosys. All three companies have land in Rajarhat, TCS and Wipro for their second campus and Infosys for its first campus. Indications from the state government and announcements from the officials have made it clear that construction work on all three campuses is soon to begin.

According to announced plans between the three campuses, the city will see combined job creation of almost 50,000 people in the IT sector. In keeping with the priority sector status which the Mamata Banerjee government has allocated to the industry in Bengal, talks are also on to remove IT from the purview of the Urban Land Ceiling Act (ULCA).

“From the current 1 lakh people that the sector employs in Bengal, I think over the next few years we should be able to double this employment number,” said Kalyan Kar, vice president of the Sector V Association.

Further impetus to the industry is slated to come from the IT hubs which have been announced by the new government. These hubs are slated to come up in tier-II cities like Haldia, Siliguri, Darjeeling and Durgapur, and form part of the government strategy to provide gainful employment without huge land investments.