Mamata Banerjee announces Rs 3,000 crore investment in IT sector

By Team Newsable | First Published Dec 4, 2020, 1:36 PM IST

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said on Thursday (December 3) that the state expects to receive investments worth Rs 3,000 crore from 20 technology ventures in Rajarhat. These ventures were cleared by the state cabinet on Tuesday and will form Phase II of the Bengal Silicon Valley Hub in Rajarhat.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said on Thursday (December 3) that the state expects to receive investments worth Rs 3,000 crore from 20 technology ventures in Rajarhat.

These ventures were cleared by the state cabinet on Tuesday and will form Phase II of the Bengal Silicon Valley Hub in Rajarhat.

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The projects cleared on Tuesday, along with those cleared earlier and slated to come up in Phase I of the Hub, are expected to generate more than 40,000 jobs.

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The Chief Minister said technology giant Wipro had committed an investment of Rs 500 crore on its second campus, where 10,000 jobs would be created, taking the IT major’s total headcount in the city to 19,000.

An Airtel data centre, one of the 20 Hub projects, will be built at a cost of Rs 350 crore. This is the second such centre by a telecom company at the Hub in Rajarhat. The other one is being developed by Reliance Jio.

The Silicon Valley Hub sprawls 200 acres. TCS, part of the first wave of companies to come to the Hub, has taken up 20 acres to build a second campus.

India’s largest IT company already employs 44,000 people in Calcutta and the headcount could go up to 61,000, the chief minister said.

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Around 1,500 IT companies, including Cognizant, IBM and Cap Gemini, operate in Bengal, together employing more than 210,000 IT professionals. Infosys recently informed the state government that work on its maiden campus would start in July 2021 and be completed in two years.

Mamata Banerjee told the audience about the rapid strides Bengal had made in the past eight years in terms of capital expenditure, and described the challenges it was dealing with since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The state GDP has gone up 2.5 times from 2011, she added.

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