BHUBANESWAR: Even as several IT companies have evinced keen interest to set up their units in Odisha, the state government is facing a unique challenge of land allotment.
Taking the situation into consideration, the Electronics and IT department has urged the General Administration department to allocate 25 acre of unutilised land located along a 100 ft road near Damana Square in the city for the development of an IT park with world-class infrastructure.
The land originally allotted to the Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA) has remained idle and unused for a long time.
“Such a dedicated facility, once developed, will resolve the pressing shortage of quality IT spaces and significantly boost the state’s IT sector growth with the city’s growing prominence as a hub of IT, electronics and semiconductors, coupled with the increasing demand for quality IT infrastructure,” the IT department said.
After a substantial portion of land in the Infovalley area was allotted to non-IT companies, the capital city lacks a well-developed IT park to accommodate the IT, ITeS, electronics, semiconductor, electronics system design and manufacturing (ESDM) industries.
Conceived in the early 2000s, the Infovalley on the city outskirts was designed to offer state-of-the-art infrastructure for IT and ESDM companies. However, at least five IT and semiconductor companies already approved by the state government have been waiting for the allotment of suitable land within Infovalley for a long time.
“This is why multinational corporations such as Deloitte, Cognizant, and Concentrix are currently operating from rented accommodations at separate locations in the city. Unlike other cities that have transformed into IT hubs, Odisha’s capital lacks the necessary infrastructure to attract global IT firms,” said an industry leader.
While companies like SiCSem Pvt Ltd, RIR Power Ltd and Heterogeneous Integrated Packaging Solutions Pvt Ltd are awaiting land allotment, the state has received investment intents of over Rs 20,900 crore in IT/ITeS, electronics, semiconductors, data centres, and ancillary sectors during the recently concluded Utkarsh Odisha Conclave.
Companies such as Zoho, Emmvee Photovoltaic Power, Smartsync Innovations, Kaynes Circuits India, Sancode Technologies, Nextgen Hitech Energy, Vistas Global WLL, and VVDN Technologies have submitted their investment intents.
Although the state government has planned to set up tech business parks, IT clusters, global capability centre (GCC) park and a network of data centres apart from an integrated FinTech cluster, no tangible progress has been made.
Industry experts warned that without proper infrastructure, Odisha risks losing investment opportunities to other cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune, which offer well-equipped IT parks and special economic zones (SEZs).