Boost for job-seekers in Bengal! Hiranandani's twin projects to generate 'thousands of jobs'

Kolkata: At a time when the Mamata Banerjee government is eager to highlight employment generated in West Bengal during her regime, Mumbai-based Hiranandani Group has signed an MoU to set up a logistics and hyperscale data park in the state that has the potential of creating “thousands of jobs”.

Darshan Hiranandani, group CEO, Hiranandani Group, however, did not specify the number of jobs that would be generated.

Officials of the group said that the number was dependent on the connectivity that the project would have with the upcoming Silicon Valley project at New Town, Rajarhat about 25 km away. In late 2018, the state government proposed to set up a new IT hub at Rajarhat that is adjacent to the existing IT hub at Salt Lake.

The Hiranandani group signed an MoU with Hindustan Motors authorities to set up the project on 100 acre of land at an investment of Rs 10,000 crore. While Hiranandani will invest Rs 8,500 crore, its associates would put in Rs 1,500 crore.

The memorandum has also laid out a time frame for the project. The first facility of industrial and logistics park is expected to be ready by June 2022 and the first data centre building will be ready by 2023.

The investment comes amidst a politically charged atmosphere. Earlier this month, while placing the budget in the assembly, chief minister Mamata Banerjee focused all her attention in highlighting the employment that her government is going to generate in the next five years.

“I am happy to announce that in the last 10 years our government has been able to create 1 crore 12.5 lakh employment…. with the planned development of huge industrial centres and infrastructure, we will be able to create 1.5 crore new employment opportunities in the next 5 years at the government, semi-government and non-government levels and through self-employment,’” said the chief minister while reading out the budget speech.

Discarding the norm of placing a vote on account just before the budget, the chief minister placed a full budget, announcing a number of industrial and infrastructure projects.

Her gesture came against the backdrop of a rising chorus of opposition leaders who criticised her government accusing it of failure to attract investment in the state and create job opportunities. Even the budget was greeted by incredulity and derision by leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Left and Congress who labelled her speech as a string of hollow promises.

Even Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar publicly expressed doubts about the Rs 12.32 lakh crore investment that the government announced it attracted from Bengal Global Business Summit, a flagship event that the government organised every year between 2015 and 2019.

The project proposed by The Hiranandani Group, one of the most prominent real estate players in the country, will be based on a land that once belonged to the factory where the Ambassador — the once ubiquitous icon of India’s controlled economy — was manufactured till May 2014.

The 100-acre land would be carved out of a total plot of 741 acre on which the automobile plant was built. The Ambassador was originally fashioned after Morris Oxford.

The logistics project will be built by Greenbase and the data centre will be set up by Yotta, both companies of the Hiranandani group.

The Greenbase project will deliver an industrial and warehousing space of 3 million square feet. The data centre project will include six buildings.

“Kicking off this project would not have been possible without the tremendous support of the government of West Bengal under the leadership of chief minister Mamata Banerjee. West Bengal is the gateway to the east. It is an ideal hub for logistics and industrial development with excellent road, rail and riverine connectivity,” said Hiranandani.

“The data centre business will benefit from the digitisation revolution, the upcoming Silicon Valley at New Town at Rajarhat and excellent fibre connectivity on land and the new submarine cable coming up at Tajpur,” he added.

Last year, Yotta unveiled Asia’s largest and the world’s second largest Uptime Institute Tier-IV data centre in Navi Mumbai. It would also development data centre parks in Chennai and Greater Noida.

Greenbase is setting up logistics and industrial parks in Chennai, Bengaluru, Mumbai MMR region, Pune and Nashik. The target is to develop 15 million sq ft in the country in five years.