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Couple of days back attended a talk at Stanford by Sabeer Bhatia on planning and development of the “Nano City” project. This has been in news last week, but he revealed a lot more details in the talk, which I will list here. The impressive thing about this project is of course the grand scale at which it is being planned. The project is much bigger than a typical SEZ, both in terms of the area being planned and the amount of investment planned. The idea of this project is to develop a complete ecosystem that promotes research, innovation and high quality development in high-tech industry.

Salient points from the talk:

• It is a public-private sector partnership between Haryana government and Sabeer Bhatia’s company

• It is being developed in a place 15 km from Chandigarh in Haryana on a land of around 5,000 acres

• A world class highway will be construcuted on the 15 km stretch, which will be an investment of $15 million

• Initially planned population density of the city is 100 per acres (just for some perspective: Delhi is 250 per acre, Mumbai is 1250 per acre, Manhattan 750 per acre), which means a total population of half a million.

• Infrastructure: $2 billion worth of investment on a power plant to supply electricity. Construction of dam on the nearby rivers to provide clean water

• Total investment for the development of this city would be roughly around $5 billion

• Plan to set up a top notch University to ensure a constant talent flow into the city. Currently in talks with some American and Australian Universities

• The 5 year plan is to have a population of around 50k and in ten years around half million (could be faster looking at how quickly Greater Noida has developed)

• The city would attract companies working on technologies like nano technology, biosciences, software product development, next generation Internet products, materials research and energy.

This could become a Shenzhen of India if it turns into reality, which will definetely encourage more state governements and corporates to take initiatives like these. Considering that there is so much [pdf link] foreign investment flowing in even with current poor infrastructure, it is mind boggling to imagine what could happen when more and more world class areas like this project spring up in India.

Another example of similar project that I spotted recently is the Smart City project in Kerela, although not much details out on this yet.