The Hindu Business Line : Creative IT to set up pharma facility in Maharashtra

The US-based Creative IT Inc would invest $500 million to set up a multi-disciplinary pharmaceutical development facility in Maharashtra within a year, its Chief Executive Officer, Mr Dilip Barot, said today.

The international drug development centre would bring under one roof about 350 experts from diverse disciplines in a synergy for the first time anywhere in the world, he told a press conference here. Initially, the company, based in Florida, would invest $150 million in the facility for which land has already been acquired near Thane in Maharashtra and subsequently expand to other places such as Pune.

The company, which set up Infocity in Gandhinagar in the year 2000 as a joint venture with the Gujarat Government, also intended to develop its new pharma facilities in Maharashtra to double up as IT destinations. Efforts would be made to bring in pharmaceutical companies from around the world to outsource their preliminary stages of drug development and multiple testing to the Maharashtra centre to cut time and cost in drug development, Mr Barot said.

Flays government

Mr Barot, whose company developed the 150-acre Infocity as an IT park, while expressing unhappiness over the pace of infrastructure development and the difficulties faced by IT companies due to archaic laws, bureaucratic bottlenecks and red-tapism, warned the Gujarat Government to pull out of the ongoing project. So far, the promoters have invested around Rs 200 crore in Infocity, which was billed to have attracted investments to the tune of Rs 2,000 crore. But the actual investments have been only Rs 100 crore by around 45 companies that have set up shop so far.

The joint venture company, Creative Infocity Ltd, has so far constructed one tower and was in the process of making three more for an investment of Rs 500 crore in the next three to four years. Each of them is likely to generate about 5,000 to 7,000 new jobs in the next four years or so. Due to unforeseen calamities since its inception, both man-made and natural, Gandhinagar failed to attract many prospective investors. "Ninety per cent of investors backed out because of various reasons. One of them, Mellon Inc, based in Pittsburg, US, backed out at the last moment on the plea that the population of Gujarat has 30 per cent members of a minority community which it saw as a risk perception."

Mr Barot pointed out that even the Gujarat Government failed to focus on Infocity as the State's most ambitious IT park and did not sell it to the prospective investors the way other States attracted them.

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