New Delhi: Your next phone call from a call centre may not necessarily be from the IT-hubs of Bengaluru, Gurgaon, or Hyderabad. It may veritably be from call centres situated in Bandipora or Kupwara in militancy-plagued Jammu and Kashmir. Plans are now being laid for setting up call centres in each district of the Union Territory.
“We are strongly looking at IT possibilities in the Union Territory. What has encouraged us to this line of thinking is that many big companies have expressed strong interest. We have already set up two high-technology skilling centres for the youth in Baramulla and Jammu that will specialize in cutting-edge domains like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT),” said an official source in the Jammu & Kashmir administration familiar with the details.
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The buzzwords now in the otherwise conflict-hit region are ‘business’, ‘projects’ and ‘turnovers’—all part of the lexicon of the four-month old New Industrial Policy (NIP), which has netted about Rs 23,000 crore so far. Of this, Rs 11,000 crore will be invested in Kashmir and Rs 12,000 crore in Jammu.
“This is just the beginning. We are optimistic about the investments to the scale of Rs 50,000 crore in the Union Territory by March 2022. Every day we get three-four calls from different investors. We are so occupied that we have had to turn back so many of them,” said a source in the Jammu & Kashmir administration.
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“While most of the calls are from domestic investors, with quite a few from Mumbai, we have attracted interest from foreign countries too—mainly from Europe,” the source said.
Most investors have evinced interest in the fields of agriculture and horticulture for which the union territory offers unique conditions because of its climate, altitude and terrain.
“Based on investor interest, we have realized that there is an enormous opportunity waiting to be unlocked in food processing. This will be our focus area for attracting the next tranche of investment. Many investors want to be associated with the fruit industry especially in apples, apricot, plum, cherry and almonds. Accordingly, plans are being laid to initiate high density plantations,” the official said. Experimentation and research on these lines are underway in full swing in Jammu, Samba and Kathua.
