Aegis eyes integrated campus in West Bengal

Even as change looks set to arrive in West Bengal in the aftermath of lingering political instability and an industry-unfriendly image haunts, the city’s information technology (IT) sector is set to witness another coup.

Aegis, the outsourcing arm of the $15-billion Essar Group set to expand footprint in West Bengal from the current 3,000 to 5,000 employees, CEO and global MD, Aparup Sengupta, told Business Standard.

“We are going to build an Aegis campus in Kolkata. We will also look at ramping up operations and hire workforce up to 2,000 people which takes our headcount in the city to 5,000”, he said.

Sengupta was in Kolkata last month for Infocom, 2011 as a speaker and met with West Bengal IT minister, Debesh Das after the event. For the campus, the company is eyeing land in the city’s showpiece IT central, Sector V, and in Rajarhat.

Last year in January, Aegis was looking at acquiring 10 acres from the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government at an undisclosed sum for setting up a campus in Kolkata, but the deal did not bear fruit.

Currently, the business process outsourcing (BPO) company looking which is looking at joining the $1 billion club by the end of the year has operations spread over a 1 lakh sq ft facility in Sector V.

“We are looking at property other than the 10 acres for setting up the campus. While no concrete property has been identified we hope to come to a settlement soon,” Sengupta said.

The development is timed at a juncture when the BPO gian is looking at ramping up the overall bulk of the work done at its Kolkata delivery centre. Aegis has clients ranging in sectors from banking, entertainment, telecom and the healthcare sectors.

It also deals with the contracts for both domestic and international clientele from the city.

The company itself has businesses across 40 locations around the world with a total employee strength of about 50, 000, and is looking at hiring an addition 11, 000 people this year.