Hyderabad, April 04: Minister for Information Technology Ponnala Lakshmaiah on Saturday said that the state government has proposed to construct an IT Tower in the Cyberabad area to cater to future requirements of the IT sector.
Apart from this, the state government has also proposed to construct IT towers of 50,000 sq. ft in Warangal and 1 lakh sq ft each in Tirupati and Visakhapatnam to cater to the requirements of SMEs.
Releasing a book in Telugu titled “IT Velugulu” (AP, the most preferred IT Destination) in his chambers at the Secretariat on Saturday, the minister said that the state now ranks fourth in the country and has a 15 per cent share in national exports and 15 per cent in national employment and employs 2,15,430 in 1,266 IT companies.
The government has also taken an initiative to provide employment opportunities to rural educated youth through 704 Jawahar Knowledge Centres (JKC) spread across the state. Around 50,000 JKC-trained students got employment on their own in other IT companies.
He added that the government was giving additional incentives and facilitation to IT companies for moving to tier-2 cities such as Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam, Kakinada, Guntur, Tirupati and Warangal.
Out of the 43 IT SEZs notified, 17 IT SEZs have become functional. As per the recent status report in these functional SEZs, 94 IT units have commenced their operations and so far have created 48,560 jobs in the IT sector in the last two years.
The minister said that a single direct employment created in the sector in turn creates four indirect employment opportunity in other sectors such as logistics, maintenance, infrastructure, tourism, hospitality, leisure, entertainment etc.
–Agencies