Work on Rajarhat IT park to begin by year-end

Kolkata: Work on the IT park proposed to be set up at the Rajarhat township in public private partnership (PPP) mode is slated to begin by the end of 2008.

The setting up of the park, which will focus on IT products, will entail an investment of a “few thousand crores”, according to Dr Debesh Das, West Bengal’s Minister for Information Technology.

Speaking to newspersons here, Dr Das said three specific hubs would be set up in the Salt Lake Electronics Complex and the Rajarhat township. These include hubs with regard to chip design, wireless applications and products and animation and multimedia.

Dr Das said a delegation of the state’s IT department led by him recently visited the UK, France and Germany to showcase West Bengal’s potential as an IT destination to companies there and to participate in an investment seminar in London that was jointly organised by the West Bengal Electronics Industry Development Corporation and Cannacord Adams, a European venture capital fund.

While in London, the team members made presentations before 50 companies. Later, the team visited Paris, Munich and Berlin and met representatives of IT companies including Alcatel Lucent and Capgemini.

While in Berlin, the team discussed the use of open source platform in the government. Dr Das said the foreign office of the German government had taken a major initiative in this regard.