Wipro has set the ball rolling for its Kolkata centre, which would eventually house around 5,000 employees.

The company is on a major recruitment drive for its business process outsourcing and IT services and would have around 400 employees by September, of which around 50 would be from outside Kolkata.

Wipro Spectramind was already operational with around 150 people and the IT services would also be operational by next month.

At present, Wipro has 10,000 employees in the BPO call centre segment and another 20,000 in IT services, across 23 centres in the country.

The investment in the Kolkata centre, as of now, was more than Rs 100 crore (Rs 1 billion) for a built-up space of three lakh square feet. The total built-up space would be arouund 500,000 sqaure feet, spread over 17 acre.

Sudip Banerjee, president -- enterprise solutions, Wipro Technologies, said typically the investment per square feet was around Rs 1,900 and this was just for infrastructure.

This puts the investment in infrastructure for the remaining 200,000 square feet would be around Rs 38 crore (Rs 380 million).

However, Banerjee said, the investment in hardware would be much more than the infrastructure.

Wipro has also approached Webel, the state's nodal agency for IT investments, for the adjacent land around the plot.

To start off, Wipro would service four of its clients from the Kolkata operations, out of which one would be a new client.

The Wipro campus would also have one or two centres of excellence. One of the major attractions of the campus was a 40,000 square feet cafetaria, currently under construction.

Wipro has also shown interest in acquiring 40-50 acres of land at Rajarhat, the new IT hub.

Banerjee said, the company has communicated to the government that it would be interested in taking up space at Rajarhat.