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AT 29, this Blackberry-wielding industrialist armed with a business degree from the UK is a young boss operating from his family’s offices in Nagpur, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, Ranchi and Durgapur. Favourite city? “Nagpur,” Abhishek Jayaswal says without hesitation. “The quality of life here is simply addictive.”

Jayaswal is director of the Abhijeet Group, which recently won the bid to set up and operate a 150 MW thermal power plant for the

Rs 3,150-crore Multimodal International Hub Airport at Nagpur (MIHAN). “I work long hours but still have time for friends, for travelling. The food is great, the people are nice. In Mumbai, you spend three hours commuting everyday. Reduce that to half-an-hour. Imagine the quality of life then.”

But tranquil evenings could hardly have drawn Boeing, Wipro, Satyam Computers, HCL, L&T, DLF and Ispat to Nagpur, until now known as a 300-year-old city with a rich history, capital of neglected Vidarbha. Suddenly, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India is checking how many of its degree holders may be required in an SEZ adjoining MIHAN, technical college principals are asking which diplomas and degrees will be in demand, placement firms are gearing up and IT students are cancelling migration plans.

And it’s all thanks to a plan not attempted anywhere in India, a plan to turn what has been the heart of the country, India’s ‘zero-point’, into a hub of international cargo movement with a multi-product Special Economic Zone (SEZ) adjacent, both to be operational less than two years from now. In the 4,354-hectare project area being planned and executed by government undertaking Maharashtra Airport Development Company Ltd (MADC) will be extra length for the existing runway to welcome the world’s biggest aircraft, the Airbus A 380; an additional airstrip located 1.6 km from the existing one, 4,000 metre long and 60 metre wide; and standing between them will be the country’s largest terminal building at 3 million square feet. Over 100 aircraft will be parked at any time, up from the current five. According to a techno-economic feasibility report, the projected passenger traffic is 14 million people per annum and 8.7 lakh tonnes of cargo traffic per annum by 2035. Adjacent will be the 2,086-hectare SEZ, for export-oriented units like IT, gems and jewellery, garments, electronic goods, pharmaceuticals and processed foods. The buzz about Nagpur is now a roar.

So, what does Nagpur offer that other cities don’t? Additional Chief Secretary

R C Sinha, vice-chairman and managing director of the Maharashtra Airport Development Company Ltd, asked himself that question at a recent conference. “Oranges? Yes, but something more as well,” he said.

While there is connectivity by air, road and rail to all parts of India, the city also occupies a strategic central point in international aviation routes; the country’s busiest ATC point is also immense potential for cargo hubbing with destinations in all directions—Europe, the CIS, Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia. With 27 engineering colleges and 8,700 graduates yearly—almost 80 per cent of them looking outside Nagpur for jobs, there is enormous human resource potential just within the city.

That’s why the facilities within the walled SEZ will cater to the world’s best corporates. “There will be a dual water supply system,” says S V Chahande, chief engineer of MADC, “separate lines for potable and non-potable water, along with a waste water treatment plant.” Also on the drawing board: An exhibition-cum-convention centre with a hotel and shopping area designed by Hafeez Contractor, a central facility building to be built by Shapoorji Pallonji. And all this infrastructure will be ready by December 2008, promises Sinha, the bureaucrat who supervised the construction of the Mumbai-Pune Expressway and who has been personally marketing the idea of Nagpur and MIHAN to global IT biggies for months now.

But it is Prem Assija, senior vice-president (Corporate) of HCL Technologies which has signed up for 140 acres of land at the SEZ, who puts Nagpur’s attraction in perspective. “There is tremendous pressure on the profit margins of IT companies,” he says, explaining the impact of the weaker dollar. As salaries and real estate prices rise, IT firms have had 10 per cent profits knocked out in four months, 15 per cent in the last 12 months. “It makes sense to go to Tier II towns,” says Assija, who’s in charge of setting up HCL campuses and is incidentally a former Nagpurite. “Also, we feel there is a large untapped pool of talent here, going elsewhere for jobs.”

BUT while MIHAN—or more precisely, the SEZ—is piloting Nagpur’s big overhaul, there is a parallel civic inventiveness attempting to sustain that growth, readying for the pressure on the city’s infrastructure.

A Rs 5,894-cr five-year investment plan is detailed in Nagpur’s City Development Plan, submitted under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM). Incidentally, Nagpur was the first city in the country to receive funds under JNNURM. For transportation, there is a 30-year masterplan for roads, foot overbridges and road overbridges, says Municipal Commissioner Lokesh Chandra. A detailed project report on two proposed Bus Rapid Transit Projects along 40 km is being drawn up for submission under JNNURM and a German joint venture firm has proposed a monorail. “Already, the City Bus service has been started as a unique PPP initiative, with 200 brand new buses ferrying commuters within the city,” says Chandra. There are a series of other initiatives—six shopping malls on BOT basis, a GIS mapping underway for property tax assessment and a pilot project by for 24 x 7 water supply.

All this means real estate is suddenly a speculative market, with prices ranging from Rs 1,500 per sq ft to Rs 5,000 per sq ft, unheard of a year ago. Served by NH-7 and NH-6, it seems that Nagpur’s central location is finally getting its due. Not long ago, a Bombay High Court judge sold his 41-acre plot abutting the Nagpur-Wardha Road and the MIHAN and SEZ areas for Rs 105 crore, a whopping Rs 2.5-crore per acre. The buyer was garment major Provogue group-promoted Hagwood Commercial Developers, expected to build a township on the land.

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