The Hindu Business Line : Mauritius — paving the way to become a cyber island

THE stalks of sugarcane swaying in the fields across the road are a reminder of what this piece of land was a few years ago. Then part of a sugar estate at Ebene, a suburb of the capital, this land fell victim to the downturn in the sugar industry in Mauritius. Part of it was donated to the Government and in return the owner was able to sell twice as much acreage to residential plots without having to pay the land re-zoning fee.

On this piece of real estate was built the island's first international-class intelligent building fit for information technology businesses.

With a line of credit of up to $100 million from the Indian Government, designed by C.R. Narayana Rao and built by Larsen and Toubro and Shapoorji Pallonji, the edifice has become the symbol of the island's aspiration to transform itself from a sugarcane-dependent economy to a cyber island.

The building was formally inaugurated today by the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, at an elegant function to cap a highly successful bilateral visit. Featuring about 4,500 metres of office space, half the size of Tidel Park in Chennai, it is already home to two Indian companies: Infosys and Hinduja TMT.

Infosys uses it at as a strategic disaster recovery site and also for software development.

It has about 50 engineers who were recruited from the local engineering university and then trained at its special facility at Mysore.

Mauritius hopes that it can be the bridge for Indian software and business process outsourcing companies to markets in the French-speaking areas of Africa, in France and in Canada.

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