New Delhi, Aug. 17: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the country’s biggest software-service exporter, will expand its training centre at Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala to accommodate new global recruits and employees.

TCS, which concluded the country’s biggest initial public offer last week raising Rs 5,382 crore, will invest between Rs 50-60 crore by the end of the current fiscal to expand the training centre.

Currently housed in a picturesque two-acre campus, the centre, which provides training to domestic recruits, will now be spread across an additional 10-acre campus with approval from the Kerala government to construct over 50 per cent of this land.

The software firm, which aggressively plans to acquire firms after it lists on the stock market, will hire over 5,000 people in the current year to March 2005. TCS, which last year hired about 3,000 people, currently has an employee strength of 30,121 of which 29,177 are based in India.

“The new training centre will be operational within the next 18 months,” said a state government official, adding that software giant Infosys Technologies and Wipro Ltd are planning to expand their software centres in the state and have already acquired land as part of the process.

Bangalore-based Infosys, which employs more than 17,000 people, has development or competency centres in eight cities spread across the country. Wipro, which is 84 per cent owned by Azim Premji, plans to set up a business process outsourcing unit over the next two to three years.

Aruna Sunderarajan, information and technology secretary to the Kerala government, said German insurer Allianz is also planning a set up an outsourcing unit along with global consultancy firms, including Ernst and Young and McKinsey.

Kerala, the country’s most literate state, missed the 1990s software boom when other south Indian states — Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh — built their software parks.