The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Continue IT sops for 10 more years, Buddhadeb writes to Centre

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Thursday, Nov 29, 2007
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Continue IT sops for 10 more years, Buddhadeb writes to Centre

Special Correspondent

Small, medium IT enterprises will benefit: West Bengal Minister

State government to provide alternative site to Infosys
“West Bengal is the best investment destination”

HYDERABAD: West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has written to the Centre to continue the concessions, extended to software companies under the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) scheme, for 10 more years.

Disclosing this at a news conference here on Wednesday, Minister for Information Technology Debesh Das said that West Bengal was the only State to ask the Centre not to withdraw the ‘sunset clause,’ as proposed in the Union Budget for 2007-08. The concessions would be beneficial to small and medium IT enterprises, he said.

Dr. Das said that his government would allot an alternative site to Infosys, which did not take a “costly piece of land,” to match the company’s pricing requirement. However, TCS had bought the same piece of 40-acre land at Rs.1.5 crore an acre. He defended the high land prices as most land was fertile and the compensation paid to the displaced was very high.

Showcasing West Bengal as the best investment destination, particularly for software and hardware industries, Dr. Das said Videocon had announced that it would set up a semiconductor unit in the State. Initially, they might invest Rs. 1,000 crore out of the total investment of Rs.4,000 crore, he said.

Nandigram

On the Nandigram issue, he said: “Now all problems have been addressed. Please go by the experiences of industry. We are going to allot more land.”

Information Technology parks would come up on 150 acres of SEZ near Kharagpur to tap the expertise of the people at the Indian Institute of Technology, which is based there.

It would be given to high-end chip designing companies.

The Indian Design Centre in Kolkata with incubation facilities and training centres was being built and fables semiconductor companies would set up units in it. The Government had set up a venture capital fund to help small and medium enterprises and give subsidy to companies for training the staff.

He highlighted the importance of finishing schools run by ‘Webel’ to make students employable.

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