An artist’s impression of the IT resort coming up at Bantala leather complex

Duplex offices with sky terraces, fast-track conferencing alongside hip dining, club, spa and cafe — all wrapped in a cascading canopy of water.

Welcome to Technopolis 2, a Rs 400-crore, 1.5-million sq ft IT resort coming up inside the Bantala leather complex as a 10-acre SEZ. The first phase will be delivered in 12 months, with the project completion date set for March 2009.

“Technopolis (in Sector V) was India’s first IT infrastructure conforming to the US Green Building Council’s LEED certification. Our effort is to take our green commitment to the next notch and create a first-of-its-kind plug-and-play IT domain,” Rahul Saraf, managing director of Forum Projects, tells Metro.

The home-grown real estate firm, which gave Calcutta its first integrated retail mall, Forum on Elgin Road, is on an aggressive rollout drive, with 30 million sq ft worth of projects in hand.

Technopolis 2 has been designed by DP Architects of Singapore, creators of the Vivo City mall in the island nation, and will “cover only 25 per cent of the land area”, according to Saraf. The rest will be landscaped with a water thread running right through.

Forum Projects is doing another mixed-use development in Bantala over 36 acres, with a built-in 10-acre waterbody. Peng Beng Khu of Singapore-based Arc Studio, the firm doing the hotel at the Lady Ranu Mukherjee address on Camac Street, is providing the design solution.

“The Bantala project will have high-tech conferencing, a retail mall with multiplex, a 125-room boutique hotel, a club, serviced apartments, residential towers and parking for 1,200 cars,” explains Saraf.

The group, which beat the Tatas to bag a 300-acre-plus land parcel in Action Area V of Rajarhat, will develop “a green IT township” there, “to cater to tomorrow’s urban demands and environmental issues”.

If Forum 2 is set to come up on the Chandra Garden opposite Science City, Forum Projects is also developing an 850,000-sq ft integrated residential complex in Howrah, opposite Don Bosco Liluah, in partnership with SpringField Projects Pvt Ltd of Silver Spring fame.

Forum Projects, which now has a land bank worth over Rs 3,500 crore, is also investing big beyond Bengal. A retail-cum-hospitality project in joint venture with the Jamshedpur civic body to celebrate the centenary year of Tata Steel, will be ready in 20 months.

A mixed-use city-centre development in Adityapur across 22.5 acres with hospitals, club, cineplex, retail, residential and conferencing facilities, and a 550,000-sq ft lifestyle mall in Bhubaneswar with 1,200 car parks are the other large-format projects on the group’s 5.5 million-sq ft retail roadmap.