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Investors make a beeline forMahindraWorldCityOverRs 8600 crareinvestmentinthe pipeline5 BRIDGET LEENA

Chennai, 26 September

, ahindraIndustrialPark,Mrecently rechristenedas Mahindra v.brld City,

will see $1.5 billion to $2 billion(Rs 6,450-8,600 crore) of in-vestments inflow, with com-panies from industries as di-verse as software, automobilesand auto ancillary, apparel andfashion, bio-technology sectorssetting up their presence inthe '

1,400 acre project.Mahindra Industrial Park is

a special purpose vehicle cre-ated for the development ofMahindra City..The promot-ers of MIPL are the MahindraGroup and Tamil Nadu In,-dustrial Development Corpo-ration (TIDCO).

Mahindra World City is, situated near Maraimalai Na-

gar, about 34 km from the Chen-nai airport. It is also accessibleby rail about 40 km from Guindyrailway station to Parnur rail-way station. The huge invest-ment happening in the World, CaptionCitycomes from the fact that ithas been approved for threesector-specific SEZs - infor-mationtechnology(services '

and manufacturing), appareland fashionaccessoriesand au-.to ancillaries and is a fully in-tergrated business townshipwith good infrastructure.

For starters, Infosys, the sec-ond largest softwarecompanyin India, The hugewill be setting up its .giant facilityat an Investment.estimated invest- ha ppeninginment of Rs 1,250crorein Mahindra the WorldCityWorldCityover 129 ,

acres thatwillem- comes from theploy25,OOOsoftware f h

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professionals. act t at It asInthefirstphase been approved

for the new campus,Infosysplanstoin- ' for three sector-vestRs250croreand .,builda facilitythat specific SEZswill have a capacityfor 5,000 people and a built-up area of nearly 1millionsqft.

German car maker, BMWrecently announced that it will

have its presence in India byhavingan assemblyplant intheSEZ at an investment of $40million (about Rs 180crore).

Singapore-basedAscendasbusiness space provider is al-soputtingup a softwarepark ,

of one million sq ft.Arun Nanda, executive

director and pres-ident-infrastructuredevelopment sec-tor, Mahindra v.brld

City says that almost642 acres of landwhich is qedicat-ed as a special eco-nomic zone (SEZ)of the 965 acres ofsaleable land hasbeen fullycommit-ted by companies'.The companieswhichhavetaken upspacewill be Mindtree, ,

Sundaram BrakeLinings, Madras Engineer-ing, Mastek, Kanbay to namea few.

Nandasaysthat Mahindrd-s

have so far pumped in Rs 300crore in only developing thepr,operty. It is not an industri-al park but an intergrated busi-ness township that offers plug-n-playfacilities in terms of elec-tricity, telephone, bandwidth,telephones, sewage etc, adds BG Menon, chief operating of-ficer, Mahindra World City.

Mahindra World City hasbeen master-planned by As-

. cendas (JTC Corporation, Sin-gapore) with landscape designby Belt Collins, Singapore. Inits complete form, MahindraWorld City will combine state-

of-the-art facilities for business iwith world-class facilities foriretail, leisure, he.althcare, hOs-

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,

pitalityand residentialhousinginthe remaining323acres. Res-idential activities will be de- Iveloped in collaboration withMahindra Gesco Developers ILtd, property arm of Mahin- Idra's and designed by Hafeez IContractor.Thepictureseque:of the WorldCity will be com-plete with the well connected

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roads, lakes, surrounded byhills and reserve forest whichform about 400 acres.

However, during the in-ception in 1997, Mahindra'splans was to promote an au-

,to ancillary park, as Chennai is,considered a hub for auto an-cillaries in the country.Mahin-dra had a tie-up with Ford forauto ancillary, the idea wasetchedfromgeographicalprox-imity to Ford being headquar-tered in Maraimalai Nagar.Al-though dueto some reason, theplan did not kick off.

There was a lull for an-other four years, Mahindra'sslowlystarted acquiringneigh-bouring lands as they had con-ceived the idea for an inter-gratedbusinesstownshipwhichwou1dbe better value propo-sition, illustrates Menon.

In September 2002, it wasinaugurated as Mahindra In- ,dustrial Park and the followingyear it was repositioned asan intergrated business town-ship.