After dithering for over six months, the Orissa government has finally got its act together on the proposed IT investment region (ITIR) in the state. A high-level task force on IT has cleared the final report on the ITIR project prepared by IL&FS-Infrastructure Development Corporation (IL&FS-IDC) and the report will be submitted soon to the Centre, Pradipta K Mohapatra, the state IT secretary told Business Standard.
It may be noted that IL&FS-IDC had submitted its final report on ITIR in July 2009. This project was in a limbo due to the slackening demand for IT projects. The ITIR in Orissa was to be developed on an area of 40 sq km (around 10,000 acres) between Bhubaneswar and Khurda. The ITIR project in the state is expected to be fully operational by 2020.
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), Orissa 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.
The entire cost of the project was yet to be ascertained. 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.
