Calcutta, Nov. 18: Come March 2004, Wipro will kick off its operations in the city in its centre in Salt Lake.

Raj Dutta, chief financial officer, Wipro Spectramind said this today on the sidelines of Infocom 2003, organised by Nasscom and Businessworld, an ABP Group publication.

“First, we will start with our business process outsourcing operations here. The core software operation will follow,” said Dutta. He, however, did not set any timeframe for kicking off software development activity.

To begin with, Wipro is laying down a 1,000-seat facility in Salt Lake Electronics Complex (Saltlec), where the work will begin with 500 people. The company employs over 8,500 people in six centres across five cities in the country and the centre in Calcutta will be its seventh facility.

Wipro Spectramind is one of the fastest growing BPO companies in the country. It’s revenue has grown from $10 million to over $21 million in the last four quarters. The rate it charges to its customers, $13.35 per hour, spread across the globe is one of the most competitive rates in the industry.

“There are lots of people from Calcutta who are working at our other facilities and they have expressed their desire to come back to Calcutta and we will give them an opportunity to relocate. Besides there will be fresh recruitment as we have scaling up plans with regard to all our centres,” he added. The three-and-a-half-year-old company is expanding both its manpower and business domain.

On Monday, chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee announced during his meeting with a group of chief executive officers that Wipro had requested for another eight acres of land in Saltlec. “We have already identified six acres of land in Saltlec and I have written a letter to Azim Premji about that,” he said during the Infocom meet.

Dutta, however, declined to comment on the company’s plan with the new plot of land.

As is the case with its other facilities, Wipro’s Calcutta centre will conduct both voice and nonvoice transactions. “We don’t have any plans to earmark the Calcutta centre for any specific operation. The facility will be used for all sorts of BPO functions,” Dutta said.

Wipro’s development centre bears a special significance for Bengal. The first file that Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee signed after assuming office in November 2000 was to allot a five-acre plot to Wipro in Saltlec to set up a software development centre.

The Wipro centre will give a fillip to ITES industry. “We have a few 100 and 200-seat call centres in the city. But we needed a brand like Wipro and it’s good they are on schedule,” said a state government official.