How Kakkanad Went From Paddy Fields to a 40,000 Crore IT Hub
Three decades ago, Kakkanad was wet paddy and rubber. Today it pushes more than 40,000 crore in IT exports a year. The transformation made Kochi a tech city, but it came with a bill few people talk about.
Drive east from Palarivattom on any Wednesday morning and you will sit in the same traffic snarl as a software architect from Cognizant, a delivery boy ferrying biryani to TCS Tower 7, 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 almost cartoonish. InfoPark Kochi, the state government's flagship tech park on the Seaport-Airport Road, posted IT exports north of 14,000 crore in 2023-24 on its own, and the wider Kakkanad-Kalamassery IT cluster — InfoPark Phase 1 and Phase 2, the adjacent Smart City Kochi, and the spillover SEZs — comfortably crosses 40,000 crore in annual exports. 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.
The fields before the fibre
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 now has its own metro line (the Kochi Metro Phase 2 spur), three multi-storey hospitals run by Rajagiri, Lourdes, and Aster, two dozen international schools, and a Lulu Mall extension that will, when finished, be one of the largest in India.
What it cost: the land, the families, the paddy
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. Conservative estimates put the agricultural land lost across the Kakkanad-Thrikkakara-Kalamassery belt since the mid-1990s at well over 3,000 acres, much of it classified paddy. Kerala has the strictest paddy-conversion law in India on paper, the Paddy and Wetland Act of 2008, and yet the conversion happened anyway, sometimes through reclassification, sometimes through quiet filling, sometimes through outright political fiat.
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 1.6 crore three-BHK apartment block, and quietly moved further inland to Thrippunithura or Vazhakkala. Kakkanad apartment prices, by every broker estimate this magazine could find, have risen roughly eight-fold in twenty years. A flat that cost 12 lakh in 2005 is comfortably 95 lakh to 1.1 crore today.
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 — Phase 3 of InfoPark is already on the drawing board, and a third Smart City-style cluster is being 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
Part of the Haila Kochi editorial team — covering the food, business, culture, and people that make Kochi what it is.
