Making the city a major IT hub will find a prominent place in the New IT Policy to be unveiled for 2010-15 by first week of June, Principal Secretary of IT and Communications K. Ratna Prabha said on Tuesday.
She was interacting with IT entrepreneurs separately at Andhra University Platinum Jubilee Guesthouse convened by the government and at a star hotel held by the CII.
Painting a rosy picture about emergence of Vizag as an IT hub in the next few years, she said the new policy would keep in view the aspirations of IT entrepreneurs.
Turnover
She said that the growth of IT turnover in Visakhapatnam was more than 35 per cent against the State average of 24.5 per cent and the national average of 20.65 per cent.
The turnover in the city was Rs.70 crores in 2004-05 as against Rs.502 crores in 2008-09.
It was projected that two IT SEZs would have a turnover of Rs.1,500 crores in next three years and Rs.2,000 crores in next five years through three SEZs.
Ms. Ratna Prabha, who promised to address the complaints of lack of amenities like banking, public transport, post office, fax and BSNL landline during review meeting with the IT entrepreneurs, said the government wanted to set up an integrated IT SEZ in the city for which they had asked the district administration to allot 100 to 200 acres.
“We are working seriously to have IT towers, incubation centre for plug-in and plug-out operators and the infrastructure for recreation to attract major IT players to the city,” she said, and promised to release subsidy of Rs.50 lakhs for anchor companies like Symbiosys for being first five anchor IT/ITES companies with 500 employees in IT or 500 in ITES in tier-II destinations.
Special IT Secretary Gopikrishna said Visakhapatnam had everything to attract big IT companies like Microsoft and IBM.
CII Vizag Chapter Chairman Sriram Ravi Chander said now the time had come to showcase the investment potential in Visakhapatnam and other tier-II destinations drawing lessons from Philippines, which had done extremely well in promoting investments in IT.
Jay Galla, Managing Director, Amar Raja Batteries Ltd, former local unit Chairman of CII K.V. Bhaskar and others spoke at the CII meeting.