IT hub may soon get Union Cabinet's nod

The proposed Information Technology investment region (ITIR) in the state is likely to get the nod of the Union cabinet soon.

"The Department of Electronics and Information Technology under the Union ministry of communications and information technology is preparing the Cabinet memorandum for the Odisha ITIR project”, said an official of the state government.

The ITIR is to be developed on an area of 40 sq km (around 10,000 acres) between Bhubaneswar and Khurda. The implementation of the proposed ITIR will involve a cost of Rs 17,883 crore.

The region would generate jobs for 0.23 million people and accommodate a population of around 0.54 million. More than 75 per cent of the investment will be made on the Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode.

The Centre has already given the in-principle approval to the project.Sources said, establishment of ITIR will help the state in attracting the foreign direct investments in the sector. Similar ITIRs are proposed in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka which have already been cleared by the Centre.

In the final project report on the ITIR, IL&FS-IDC had included among other things an airport, a global IT training centre, a bio-tech park and a science city spread over 350 acres.

The airport was proposed to be developed on an area of about 2,300 acres close to the site of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Odisha which is being developed over 900 acres of land at Jatni, about 20 km from the city. The Infocity-II project being developed by the state government on over 600 acres of land at Janla on the outskirts of the city would also be a part of the IT investment region.

The ITIR would be developed in two phases out of which 20 per cent of the investment would be committed for the first phase while the balance 80 per cent of the investment for the project will be in the second phase.

While the Centre was to provide external infrastructure for the project in the form of roads, the onus was on the state government to acquire land for the project.

According to the project plan of IL&FS-IDC, 40 per cent of the area of the ITIR would be earmarked for the processing units of information technology (IT) and ITes sectors (IT enabled services) as well as electronics and hardware manufacturing units. The remaining 60 per cent of the area in the region would be devoted to the non-processing facilities like research and development centre, technological institutes of national and international repute.

This apart there would be a central business district, an integrated township comprising social infrastructure facilities like schools, hospitals and shopping malls and external infrastructure like roads.