All companies which signed MoUs may not set up units here: Telangana IT Minister

In a candid admission, Telangana Industries and IT Minister D. Sridhar Babu said that all the companies with which the State Government has signed memorandums of understanding (MoU) may not set up their units here.

The companies which evinced interest in setting up their units need to fulfil conditions like financial closure before making investments. The State Government signed 108 MoUs with major firms envisaging investment to the tune of ₹5.86 lakh crore during the global summit as well as the Telangana Rising delegation’s visit to Davos to participate in the World Economic Forum meeting.

Mr. Sridhar Babu said the firms planning investments would look for facilities like availability of five star category hotels for their top officials to stay, international schools and reputed hospitals. “During Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy’s interaction with industrialists in Davos, head of a leading IT company enquired about the facilities available,” he said replying to a query in the Legislative Assembly.

The firms sought a proper ecosystem and facilities and were basically looking at profits for expanding their presence. On requests for IT towers in Tier-II cities, the IT Minister said an IT tower in Adilabad was likely to be inaugurated in a couple of days and the government was looking at anchor companies for setting up IT towers and supporting firms for making them viable. “The previous government has used the concept of IT towers for promoting real estate. Several of them are therefore lying vacant,” he said.

The government had succeeded in attracting global capability centres to the State and it was now focusing on data centres. The TCS subsidiary HyperVault initiated works on 1 GW data centre with an estimated ₹70,000 crore investment. “These data centres will prefer their location closer to IT hubs owing to the processing time. They are guzzlers of power and water,” he said.

But these data centres had prospects for huge employment generation right from the construction stage with scope for direct and indirect jobs. “Construction work force will have jobs for two to three years while ancillaries will set up their units in the vicinity. Since the announcement of data centres, firms engaged in server manufacture are enquiring about the investment prospects,” he said.