Can Maharashtra’s IT engine hold?

During the campaign for Lok Sabha polls in 2024, Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) chief Sharad Pawar narrated a lesser-known story that has now gained renewed relevance.

- Siddharth Gadkari

In the late 1990s, the state was exploring locations to set up a sugar factory in the Hinjewadi region, then a sleepy village on Pune’s outskirts. Pawar, who was the Union minister for defence and had a growing influence in Maharashtra politics, persuaded local farmers to give up their land not for sugarcane cultivation or a factory, but for something he believed was the future — information technology. The idea, he told them, was to build a new kind of economy. The locals agreed. And that land, stretching over hundreds of hectares, would go on to become the Rajiv Gandhi Infotech Park.

Today, nearly three decades later, the promise of progress that came with gleaming towers and global IT firms has collided with a grim civic reality. The very land that was once held up asa symbol of forward-thinking governance now represents a planning failure. Power outages, water shortages, traffic jams, encroachments, and a patchy drainage system plague Hinjewadi’s daily life —even as the software exports from this area fuel Maharashtra’s digital economy.

Spread across 700 hectares of Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) land divided into three phases, Hinjewadi’s IT park houses more than 165 IT and allied companies across three developed phases. These phases now support a workforce of over four lakh peopleand continue to attract major real estate and infrastructure investment. Yet, residents and workers here struggle with problems usually associated with neglected urban peripheries. For all its economic output — estimated to be around 29,000 crore annually — Hinjewadi remains a civic work-in-progress. According to 2024 estimates, Hinjewadi accounts for roughly 60% of the Maharashtra’s total IT export.

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