Satyam is establishing to Nagpur

NAGPUR: When Satyam signed a deal at chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh's official residence here in December last year to acquire 100 acres of land in the proposed multi-modal international cargo hub at Nagpur (Mihan), it created a big splash.
The confidence shown by the software major in the project injected it with a new life. But bigger things were to follow, like a township outside Mihan with 50,000 dwellings.
As soon as Satyam unveiled its software park plan for Nagpur, a large number of its employees submitted applications seeking relocation to the Orange City.
The company management was dazed by the response, a source close to a top boss in Satyam told TOI. Within days, the company pressed its real estate arm, Maytas, into action and struck a deal to buy 500 acres of land, apart from the 100-acre piece it had acquired under the Mihan project.
Only seven km away from the city on the much-sought-after Wardha road, Satyam plans to invest Rs 3,000 crore in the integrated township project. This is the biggest real estate deal in this part of the country.
Satyam's corporate communications executive Shakuntala Sarkar confirmed that the first phase of the software park project in Mihan would be operational by the end of 2007-'08 "subject to availability of infrastructure like roads, electric supply and drainage".
She said the campus would house 500 people to begin with, and admitted that Nagpur had evinced a lot of interest internally.
"We are expecting some relocation requests to come in when the centre becomes operational," she said. However, she refused to comment on the township project, saying that Satyam was not directly associated with it.
The man chosen to partner Satyam in the township deal is a well-known city builder, Gopal Kondawar of Jagdamba Realtors Pvt Ltd.
Kondawar, whose rustic looks belie his calculating brain, had the foresight to anticipate a big demand, and diversified from his booming construction business to accumulate land in the last two years. It has paid off.
"Not only have they bought the land from me, they have also agreed to make me a partner in their township project__which will be known as the Maytas-Jagdamba township," said an elated Kondawar who has a 20 per cent stake in the joint venture."It will be a first-of-its-kind township."
Work on the Satyam software park, which will generate 5,000 jobs, will begin next month and is expected to be completed by December next year.
Nagpur and nearby cities, where over two dozen engineering colleges are located, produce 9,000 engineers a year.
No wonder then that other software giants, including Infosys and Wipro, have included Mihan and Nagpur in their future plans.
Source