Land identified for software park in Agra

After coming too close to losing the Software Technology Park project to Aligarh for the lack of adequate location, the Agra Development Authority has finally agreed to allocate land for the project near the industrial area at Shastri Puram on the Agra-Delhi highway.

The Software Technology Park project for Agra had been approved by the Software Technology Parks of India Ltd (STPI) about four years back but the project never took off due to the paucity of land at the locations suggested by STPI.

Now, with the ADA arriving on a decision in a meeting held last week to allot about 2 acre of its land at Shastri Puram for establishing the STP, the local IT industry is upbeat about the business and employment possibilities it could generate for the town's IT professionals as well as bringing Agra on the country's software export chart.

Talking to Business Standard, Rakshit Tandon, who runs an IT consultancy firm apart from heading a number of IT organisations in Agra said the STPI officials had even conducted a visit of the locations that had been marked by the Agra Development Authority last year, but while the one location was declared as inadequate by the STPI due to overhead power lines across the land, the second location was found to be quite away from the city's industrial and commercial areas and both the proposals had been subsequently rejected.

According to Tandon, even the Agra University had refused to part with nearly three acre of its land which had been demanded by the Agra authorities for developing the Software Technology Park.

Consequently, he said, speculations had been rife in the local IT industry about the park slipping away to the nearby town of Aligarh, which had apparently made an offer to provide ample land for setting up the park there.

At this crucial time, he said, the ADA's proposal to allocate land for the STP on the Agra-Delhi highway had come as a life-saver for the town's IT industry which, for long, had been suffering from the serious problem of brain drain, with IT professionals of the town emigrating to Delhi and Noida in the absence of adequate opportunities in Agra.

"Though the land offered by the ADA is not quite large, it could be considered as a beginning for Agra in the field of Information Technology. With other private real estate companies like Narsi also planning to establish their own software parks in the town, there is a possibility of Agra becoming a possible global software development destination," Tandon added.