IT majors reluctant to set shop in Goa

Panaji, Aug 14 (UNI) Information Technology majors like Infosys were reluctant to set up base in Goa for want of huge chunks of land, state IT Minister Dayanand Narvekar said today.

Besides, Wipro too had not yet responded to the state government's offer of 1.20 lakh square metre prime land in Dona Paula Plateu, the minister said while interacting with mediapersons here.

Several of the second run players in the field however responded to the offer of 18 plots in the Rajiv Gandhi IT Habitat at a price of Rs 4,800 per square metre inclusive of Rs 1500 infrastructure development cost, he said.

''Fifteen plots had so far been alloted and the rest would be made available soon by the Information Technology Corporation of Goa (ITG), which envisaged an employment potential of 30,000 when the units start functioning,'' he said.

For the habitat houses, various IT industries and ITes companies 1.84 lakh square metres of land was earmarked. Some of the companies which got the land included Ampersand Digital Media and Entertainment, Technology Option India Pvt Ltd and M/S SAS Servizio Ltd.

The latter was in the business process outsourcing sector in association with the Hewlett Packard spread over different places like in Mumbai and Haryana. It proposes to invest Rs 200 crore to generate an employment potential of 1700, Mr Narvekar said.

The ITG had also earmarked sites to companies engaged in infrastrcture development for the IT sector on lease cum sale basis such as the Tata Housing Development Corporation in association with a local firm set to develop infrastructure on 23,000 square metres in the Habitat.

Devashri Real Estate belonging to Dempo group of companies had also been alloted 7000 square metres, D S Contractor 6800 square metre for development of the sites for IT sector and another leading real estate company Pawa International 40,000 square metres.

All these infrastructure development companies were expected to generate at least 10,000 jobs in various applications of BPO, software development and IT enabled services.

The basic infrastructure development by the ITG, now in progress, included laying of roads, compound walls and drainage system.

Other facilities like building sewage/garbage treatment plant, street lighting and landscaping would comnmence shortly and all were expected to be completed by April 2007.

He had urged the beneficiary industries to plan their own infrastructure facilities in advance so that they commenced their IT operations from April next itself.

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