The country’s second largest IT services firm, Infosys’ target to showcase its Mysuru campus as a ‘Smart City’ by April has been delayed indefinitely.

The company had sent out a statement on January 14, soon after CEO Vishal Sikka’s meeting with the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, in New Delhi; announcing its plan to inaugurate its 350-acre Mysuru Campus, as a Smart City by April.

Sources who are privy to the development told BusinessLine that Sikka had invited Modi to inaugurate the Smart City and the reason for the delay is the non-availability of dates in April from the Prime Minister, who has a packed travel schedule this month. Sikka’s vision of showcasing the sprawling 350-acre Mysuru campus, which is a mini city by itself with 12 million sq ft built-up area and capacity to host over 15,000 trainees residing on campus, 8,000 employees and several thousands of contract workers.

“We have two unique skills at Infosys – an unbelievable competence in building physical infrastructure as demonstrated in all of our urban spaces across the country, totalling over 2,600 acres with a built up area of 39 million sq feet. Our other area of competence is in software coding/technology. We want to bring together these two unique skills to digitise physical spaces,” Sikka had said in an earlier interaction with BusinessLine .

Cashless campus

While Infosys plans to showcase smart city, industry leading practices such as radiant cooling, day lighting, effective retrofit strategies to reduce its energy consumption, zero waste to landfill approach in the Mysuru Campus; other “firsts” are also being simultaneously planned at its Bengaluru Campus.

According to sources, Infosys wants to enable “cashless transactions” for all purchases made within its Bengaluru Campus. The company has partnered with a large multinational bank to enable it through “contact-less smart cards” that use RFID and NFC technology. The Bengaluru campus has a large number of food courts, independent restaurants/cafes, retail outlets, gift shops where employees transact every single day.

The company is in the final stages of testing the contactless smart cards, which will then be rolled out across its campuses.