HCL's Global Development Centre to come up at Amaravati

HCL Technologies Monday conducted the ground-breaking ceremony for its Global Development Centre, which will be a production house for high end new age technlogies, in the capital region Amaravati.

State Information Technology Minister N Lokesh performed the 'bhumi puja' for the project at Kesarapalli village opposite Vijayawada airport in the capital region.

This is the first of the two development centres HCL Technologies will be setting up in the Amaravati region at an aggregate investment of Rs 700 crore over the next 10 years.

The two centres are expected to create over 7,000 jobs in the next decade.

HCL and the Andhra Pradesh government had signed a Memorandum of Understanding in March 2017 to set up the development centres, but land allocation issues delayed the project, though the company was supposed to operationalize phase-1 by August 2018.

The first phase of the Global Development Centre,which will be a production house for high-end new age technologies, is expected to become operational in January 2020 with about 1,200 employees, according to HCL Technologies Executive Vice-President Srimathi Shivashankar.

"Recruitment of staff would happen parallel to the development of infrastructure here and they will be trained on projects in Chennai and Bengaluru.

We will be creating an innovation lab and a skill development centre in the Vijayawada campus," she said.

"This project is part of our New Vistas programme where we are expanding into emerging cities.

The thrust is on leveraging local talent and creating more employment opportunities for the local youth, not just engineers, but also science graduates," she told PTI.

HCL has set up similar development centres, under 'New Vistas,' in Lucknow, Nagpur and Madurai that became operational in the last two years with over 7,000 employees.

"We are in the third year of this initiative and now we are here in Vijayawada. This also goes along with our campaign 'Come Back Home'.

Getting people who have left Andhra...who would like to come back to be with their families, we want to get such people back to Vijayawada," Shivashankar said.

The company's major focus, the EVP said, was to get women who would like a career to be in Information Technology as HCL believed in getting more women at work.

"Also, women engineers who moved to this city and like a second career and late starters as well. We would like to invite them also (for employment)," she added.

HCL Corporation CEO Roshni Nadar Malhotra, HCL Healthcare Vice-Chairman Shikhar Malhotra, state IT Principal Secretary K Vijayanand and others attended the ground-breaking ceremony.