How Kakkanad Went From Paddy Fields to an 11,000 Crore IT Hub
Three decades ago, Kakkanad was wet paddy and rubber. InfoPark alone now exports more than 11,000 crore of software a year. The transformation made Kochi a tech city, and it came with a bill few people talk about.
Drive east from Palarivattom on a weekday morning and you will sit in the same traffic snarl as a software architect from Cognizant, a delivery boy ferrying biryani to a TCS tower, and a grandmother who still calls this stretch "Kakkanad village." All three know the same truth: the place they are crawling through used to be paddy. Now it is the engine room of Kerala's economy.
The numbers are big, though smaller than the ones that get thrown around. InfoPark Kochi, the state government's flagship tech park on the Seaport-Airport Road, posted IT exports of 11,417 crore in 2023-24, a record in its twenty-year history and up more than 24 percent on the year before, from a base of about 3,000 crore in 2016-17. Fold in the adjacent Smart City Kochi and the spillover SEZs and the wider Kakkanad cluster is well over 12,000 crore. For scale, Kerala's three tech parks together exported about 25,000 crore that year: Technopark 13,255 crore, InfoPark 11,417 crore, Cyberpark 121 crore. Roughly 60,000 people badge in here every working day. Six hundred plus companies have set up shop. The marquee names read like a Nasdaq index: TCS, Wipro, Infosys, Cognizant, EY Global Delivery Services, IBM, Nielsen, Allianz Technology. None of this existed in any meaningful form before 2004.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| Late 1990s | Technopark Thiruvananthapuram succeeds and Kerala's planners start looking for a northern twin |
| 2004 | The state government inaugurates InfoPark Kochi on roughly 100 acres of converted land near Kakkanad |
| A few years later | Phase 2 opens across the road, pushing the total footprint past 300 acres |
| 2007 | Kerala signs a framework agreement with Tecom Investments of Dubai to build Smart City Kochi on 246 acres |
| 2016 onwards | Smart City comes alive in stages after years of political wrangling and missed deadlines |
What was Kakkanad like before InfoPark?
Ask anyone over fifty who grew up in Kakkanad, Kakkanad-Kunnumpuram, Chembumukku, or Thrikkakara and they will tell you the same story. Until the mid-1990s this was a sleepy belt of low-lying paddy fields, rubber plantations, the occasional pepper vine, and a Bhagavathy temple or two per panchayat. Kochi proper was Ernakulam, Marine Drive, MG Road. Kakkanad was where the Collectorate happened to sit, and where you went for a quiet Sunday lunch at someone's tharavadu.
The first crack in that quiet came with Technopark Thiruvananthapuram succeeding in the late 1990s. Kerala's planners wanted a northern twin. In 2004 the state government formally inaugurated InfoPark Kochi on roughly 100 acres of converted land near Kakkanad. Phase 2 followed across the road a few years later, pushing the total footprint past 300 acres. The first big tenant, TCS, opened doors and within a decade had become the largest single private employer in the district.
Smart City and the Dubai bet
The second wave was foreign. In 2007, the Kerala government signed a framework agreement with Tecom Investments of Dubai, the same group behind Dubai Internet City, to build Smart City Kochi on 246 acres directly adjoining InfoPark. After years of political wrangling, missed deadlines, and a famously sticky land-handover dispute, Smart City finally came alive in stages from 2016 onwards. Today it hosts its own anchor tenants and has shifted the centre of gravity of Kochi office leasing decisively eastward from MG Road.
The compounding effect on the local economy has been violent and obvious. CIAL, the Cochin International Airport, sits twenty minutes up the same Seaport-Airport Road. Kakkanad is getting its own metro line: the Pink Line, Phase 2 of the Kochi Metro, runs 11.2 km from JLN Stadium to InfoPark across 11 stations, and the Kakkanad end of it (InfoPark, KINFRA, Cochin SEZ and Civil Station) is due by December 2026, so the stations that matter most out here are not carrying commuters yet. International schools have followed the salaries. The big private hospitals are a drive away rather than on the doorstep: Aster Medcity at Cheranalloor, Rajagiri at Chunangamvely, Lourdes at Pachalam. And the Lulu Group's Kakkanad project turned out to be offices rather than retail, the Lulu IT Twin Towers at SmartCity, a 1,500 crore pair rising 152 metres, opened by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on 28 June 2025 and billed as South India's tallest IT towers.
What did the Kakkanad IT boom cost in land and families?
Here is the part the brochures skip. Tech parks and Smart Cities do not appear on virgin land. They appear on someone's grandfather's field. A great deal of agricultural land across the Kakkanad-Thrikkakara-Kalamassery belt has gone under concrete since the mid-1990s, much of it classified paddy, and no public dataset puts a clean acreage on the loss. Kerala has one of the strictest paddy-conversion laws in India on paper, the Paddy and Wetland Act of 2008. The fields went anyway.
The displaced families were not, mostly, evicted in the dramatic Singur sense. They were bought out. Some did very well. Many, particularly those who sold early before the rates exploded, watched their two-acre family plot become a TCS tower and a three-BHK apartment block, and moved further inland to Thrippunithura or Vazhakkala. Kakkanad apartment prices have risen several times over in twenty years, which reads as a fortune made or a fortune missed depending entirely on which side of the sale you were standing.
The daily price of success
And then there is the traffic. The Seaport-Airport Road, designed in another decade for another volume of vehicles, now carries lakhs of commuters a day. The Kundannoor-Vyttila-Kakkanad triangle is one of the slowest stretches of road in south India between 9am and 11am. Air quality, once a non-issue in this leafy belt, is now actively monitored. Lake Vembanad's eastern feeder canals, which used to drain these paddy fields, are clogged with construction silt.
None of this is an argument against what happened. Kerala needed jobs that paid more than remittance and tourism, and Kakkanad delivered them. But the next chapter of this story, and Phase 3 of InfoPark is already on the drawing board with a third Smart City-style cluster mooted near Brahmapuram, is going to be written by people who remember both halves of the deal: the salary, and the paddy field that paid for it.
Written By
Haila Kochi Editorial Team
Part of the Haila Kochi editorial team, covering the food, business, lifestyle, and people that make Kochi what it is.
