RTI filed by me · Hosur, Tamil Nadu
Hosur’s IT Tower is full. Its public record is not.
ELCOT reports full occupancy and 750 jobs. But the records behind those numbers tell a messier story: tenants appear and disappear, a Gazette order cuts the SEZ by 27% while official sources retain the old acreage, and a major Rolls-Royce / HAL venture is absent from the RTI reply meant to clarify it all.
Governmentof Tamil Nadu
Published vs. notified area
174.47 → 126.16 acres
The department page and RTI reply retain the old figure; a July 2024 Gazette order records the smaller notified area.
Tower occupancy, 2021 → 2026
38% → 100%
Four ELCOT-authored counts of the same 62,100 sq ft building, five years apart, agreeing on almost nothing in between
Jobs projected vs. counted
750 of 10,000
Current employment reported in August 2026 against the five-year direct-jobs projection repeated in the same RTI reply.
Land visible in the records
~63 of 174 acres
A patchwork of leases, a cancelled allotment, and a utility reserve — not a current plot-by-plot ledger.
Ten records, one site
The closer the records get to the present, the less neatly they fit.
The Government of India approved the ELCOT IT SEZ at Viswanathapuram, Hosur, on 26 July 2007. Nineteen years later, its story is scattered across nine primary documents: the state IT department’s live page, an RTI reply I received from ELCOT in August 2026, a 2021 investor brochure, two Encumbrance Certificates, two Gazette of India notifications, and two internal ELCOT eOffice files. I also checked the site against Tamil Nadu’s live cadastral map.
Read in sequence, they reveal something larger than a handful of mismatched numbers. The Tower fills up, but its tenant list keeps changing. The legal boundary shrinks by more than a quarter, but later official sources keep the old acreage. And ELCOT repeats a 10,000-job projection in the same reply that reports only 750 current employees — without supplying the records needed to reconcile the two.
The record, in order
Nineteen years of promises, leases, revisions, and missing links.
Each entry is anchored to a dated record. The colors separate the ordinary milestones from the details that slipped through and the moments when one official account collides with another.
- 26 Jul 2007 Official record
Letter of approval issued
The Government of India approves ELCOT’s proposal for a sector-specific IT/ITES Special Economic Zone at Viswanathapuram village, Hosur Taluk.
- 4 May 2009 Official record
SEZ formally notified — 70.01 hectares
Gazette S.O. 1155(E) notifies the zone across 12 survey numbers (1/2 through 3/9), totalling 70.01 hectares — about 173 acres. The table does not include Survey 3/6 or 3/10, both of which later turn up in the SEZ’s own boundary schedule with no second notification on record to explain the addition.
- 11 Oct 2017 Slips through
The IT Tower opens without statutory approval
The Chief Minister inaugurates a stilt-plus-three-floor, 62,100 sq ft building. ELCOT’s site engineers had approved the plan prepared by M/s. Wadia Techno Engineering, but it was never submitted to HNTDA, the statutory planning authority. The gap remains invisible in the public account.
- 2021 Official record
First occupancy count: 38%
ELCOT’s own statewide investor brochure puts the Tower at 174.47 acres of land and 23,489 of 62,100 sq ft leased — Chandusoft, Eminentlabs Software, and Thendral Infotech. Two of those three names will not survive to the next count.
- circa 2022–23 Slips through
Department page: 74%, four different names
The state IT department’s public Hosur page — still the live page today — lists 45,661 of 62,100 sq ft allotted, to UST Global, Vision Plus Security Control, Chandusoft, and Msteel Detailing Services. Only Chandusoft survived from 2021, at a smaller footprint. It reserves 12 acres for a TNEB substation and marks 93.25 acres still available.
- 23 Sep 2022 Slips through
Tamil Nadu approves a de-notification, quietly
The state government approves ELCOT’s request to de-notify part of Survey 3/1 from SEZ status. Nothing public changes yet — the Gazette order won’t land for another twenty-two months.
- 9 Feb 2023 Contradicts the rest
A 12-acre lease that later goes missing
A registered deed hands 12 acres 4 cents in Survey 3/1 to International Aerospace Manufacturing Pvt. Ltd. (IAMPL), a 50:50 Rolls-Royce / HAL joint venture. It is among the largest — and by profile, the most prominent — industrial occupants connected to the site.
- 2023 Slips through
A second attempt at the missing approval stalls
A civil engineer is engaged to pursue the Tower’s still-outstanding HNTDA building-plan approval. Rs. 50,900 in scrutiny fees is sanctioned but never remitted — a portal fault — and the engineer walks away from the file.
- 19 Jul 2024 Contradicts the rest
The SEZ shrinks by Gazette order — 27%
S.O. 2903(E) formally de-notifies 18.9535 hectares of Survey 3/1, citing the state’s 2022 approval. The resultant notified SEZ becomes 51.0565 hectares — about 126.16 acres, down from 174.47. No later document in this record — not the RTI reply, not the department’s page — reflects the smaller number.
- 19 Dec 2024 Contradicts the rest
ELCOT reopens the approval it never finished
A fresh internal file states, almost in passing, that the Tower now has seven tenants and 500 employees. It names Thendral Infotech and JLK Automation India; neither appears in the RTI reply twenty months later. The file exists because clients need the building-plan approval for compliance audits — not because a regulator asked.
- Mar–May 2025 Slips through
Two firms bid for the same plot
Annai Trading Corporation and Vetha Constructions both apply for the same 3.26-acre commercial parcel on Plot 16. Their job-creation claims differ by a factor of nine — 3,300 direct jobs against 365 — for functionally similar retail-and-hospitality proposals. As of the file’s last noting, no decision is recorded.
- 2 May 2025 Slips through
A work order, finally, for the approval
Rs. 4,20,000 is sanctioned to a third, registered civil engineer to prepare retrospective drawings for the HNTDA approval — almost eight years after the building opened. The file ends here; there is no record of the approval itself being granted.
- August 2026 Contradicts the rest
My RTI reply: 100% occupied, no SEZ-plot table
ELCOT reports full Tower occupancy across six tenants, 750 employees, and “50% approx.” land utilization. But the reply does not supply the requested list of leased SEZ plots; page two repeats the Tower table, then lists only two non-SEZ lessees. IAMPL and three smaller leases found in the Encumbrance Certificates are absent.
The building, four times over
One 62,100 sq ft tower. Four ELCOT-authored headcounts. Only one tenant appears in all four.
These are separate snapshots, not a continuous occupancy register. Read from left to right, the building moves from just over a third full to fully let. Underneath that clean upward line, however, the tenant names keep changing.
ELCOT’s own investor brochure
23,489 of 62,100 sq ft named
- Chandusoft Technologies 10,550 sq ft
- Eminentlabs Software 9,950 sq ft
- Thendral Infotech 2,989 sq ft
The department’s public web page — still live today
45,661 of 62,100 sq ft named
- UST Global 21,100 sq ft
- Vision Plus Security Control 14,139 sq ft
- Chandusoft Technologies 6,961 sq ft
- Msteel Detailing Services 3,461 sq ft
Internal ELCOT file, in passing
500 employees, 7 named tenants — no sq ft broken out
- US Technology International
- Chandusoft Technologies
- Thendral Infotech
- Screen Artz
- JLK Automation India
- Process Drive India
- Diggibyte Technologies
My RTI reply
62,100 of 62,100 sq ft named
- US Technology International 21,100 sq ft
- Global We Connect Technologies 10,950 sq ft
- Chandusoft Technologies 10,550 sq ft
- Diggibyte Technologies 8,950 sq ft
- Process Drive India 7,089 sq ft
- Screen Artz 3,461 sq ft
Chandusoft Technologies is the only name to appear in more than two snapshots, and even its footprint moves: 10,550 sq ft in 2021, 6,961 sq ft on the department page, then 10,550 sq ft again in the RTI reply. Vision Plus Security Control and Msteel Detailing Services appear on the still-live department page but not in the December 2024 internal file. Thendral Infotech returns in that file; Eminentlabs does not reappear in the later records reviewed here. Global We Connect Technologies is different: its absence from the December 2024 file is consistent with reporting that it began operating only in 2026.
The gap in the RTI reply
The RTI reply omits the SEZ-plot table. IAMPL is the largest missing lease I found elsewhere.
What the Encumbrance Certificate shows
A lease deed registered 09-Feb-2023 in Survey 3/1 records International Aerospace Manufacturing Pvt. Ltd. (IAMPL) as claimant for 12 acres 4 cents, executed by ELCOT (J. Loganathan Jagadeesan) — naming Seenivasan Balasubramanian on the claimant side, the same person named as IAMPL’s CEO in coverage of the facility’s 2026 inauguration.
IAMPL is a 50:50 joint venture between Rolls-Royce and Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), manufacturing precision aero-engine compressor and turbine parts. Its expanded Hosur unit was inaugurated on 14 May 2026 by Rolls-Royce India’s Executive Vice President and HAL’s Chairman and Managing Director, with a further £30 crore expansion announced at the same event.
What the RTI reply says
ELCOT’s August 2026 reply names six Tower tenants and two non-SEZ land lessees, Ascent Circuits and Vinir Engineering. Although the document reproduces my request for a list of every leased SEZ plot, no corresponding plot table appears. Page two repeats the Tower table instead.
IAMPL is not the only omission. The Encumbrance Certificates also record leases to Hical Technologies, Acubetech Solutions, and Universal Conveyors that do not appear in the reply. But IAMPL’s 12.04 acres exceeds those three leases combined, making the aerospace venture the largest missing allotment found in this review.
IAMPL’s absence from the Tower table is expected: its lease is for open land, not office space. The problem is the separate request for “all SEZ plots leased out.” In the three-page reply supplied to me, that answer is not present.
A second gap, still unfixed today
The SEZ shrank by 27% in 2024. The later official sources reviewed here still say 174.47 acres.
Two Gazette of India notifications, absent from every other document in this file, bracket the zone’s entire legal history.
What the two Gazette notices establish
S.O. 1155(E) of 4 May 2009 notified 70.01 hectares (≈173.0 acres) across 12 named survey numbers. S.O. 2903(E) of 19 July 2024 records that Tamil Nadu approved a de-notification request back in September 2022, before the Gazette removed 18.9535 hectares of Survey 3/1 — leaving a resultant notified area of 51.0565 hectares, about 126.16 acres.
What nobody updated afterward
The de-notification is partial, not total — Survey 3/1 was 43.01 hectares in 2009, and roughly 24.06 hectares of it remain in the SEZ. But two years after the Gazette order, the department’s own live Hosur page — re-checked for this piece on 23 August 2026 — still states 174.47 acres, the pre-2024 figure. So does the RTI reply filed the same month. Nothing in this file’s most current, official sources reflects the state’s own Gazette order.
Survey 3/1 is also where the Encumbrance Certificate records IAMPL’s 12.04-acre lease, registered in February 2023 — before the 2024 Gazette order. This piece cannot determine, from the documents gathered so far, whether IAMPL’s plot sits inside the portion that stayed in the SEZ or the portion that left it.
The approval that lagged behind the building
The Tower opened in 2017. Seven years later, ELCOT was still trying to secure its building-plan approval.
An internal ELCOT file opened in December 2024 reconstructs the missed submissions, stalled payments, and repeated attempts that followed. The file ends in May 2025 with a new work order, not a copy of the final approval.
ELCOT’s own noting explains why the issue became urgent: “the building plan approval is now required by clients for their internal audit purpose, and it is a statutory compliance for ELCOT.” On the evidence in this file, tenants’ compliance reviews — not a government inspection — pushed the unresolved approval back onto ELCOT’s agenda.
The land
Using the published 174.47-acre total, these records account for roughly 63 acres.
ELCOT’s RTI reply gives a rounded “50% approx.” land-utilization figure without a plot ledger. The leases found in the Encumbrance Certificates, the RTI tables, and the department page’s TNEB reservation total roughly 63 acres — but that sum includes a cancelled 10-acre lease and mixes SEZ land, non-SEZ land, and a utility reserve.
This is a map of what the documents name, not a current allotment ledger. The hatched segment is simply the difference between those named parcels and the old 174.47-acre total. It may include leases the two Encumbrance Certificate searches did not reach; it should not be read as vacant land.
Show every lease, with dates and deed detail
Registered 06-Nov-2012, 100-year term — cancelled 27/28-Jul-2020 (deed 8102/2020). Absent from the RTI reply and from the department page’s current tenant framing.
Named on the department’s live page as an active land lessee — not repeated in the RTI reply.
Named on the department’s live page as an active land lessee — not repeated in the RTI reply.
Rolls-Royce / HAL joint venture. Registered 09-Feb-2023, Survey 3/1. Facility inaugurated 14-May-2026 by Rolls-Royce India’s EVP and HAL’s CMD, with a further £30 crore expansion announced. Absent from the Aug 2026 RTI reply.
Registered 03-Jul-2024, Survey 3/9P. Present in the Encumbrance Certificate, absent from the RTI reply.
Registered 07-Oct-2024, Survey 3/9. Present in the Encumbrance Certificate, absent from the RTI reply.
Registered 18-Dec-2024, Survey 3. Also appears in the RTI’s separate non-SEZ table with an identical 12.37-acre figure and a 2024–2123 term — the same company holding land in two categories.
Registered 05-Dec-2024, completed 06-Mar-2025, Survey 3. Present in the Encumbrance Certificate, absent from the RTI reply.
Non-SEZ plot 11, lease from 09-Jun-2025 to 08-Jun-2124. Named only in the RTI reply, outside the EC search window used here.
An allotment caught mid-process
Two firms bid for the same 3.26-acre plot — with a 9-to-1 gap in the jobs they promised.
A separate internal eOffice file captures ELCOT’s land-allotment process mid-flight for a non-SEZ commercial plot facing National Highway 207. It also shows how heavily the decision could depend on employment promises that ELCOT later says it does not track plot by plot.
Annai Trading Corporation
Filed 9 Apr 2025 — online, deposit paid
- Proposed use
- Mall with multiplex (1.8 ac) + service apartments (0.6 ac) + hospital/convention hall (0.89 ac)
- Jobs claimed
- 3,300 direct · 2,900 indirect
- Investment claimed
- ~Rs. 209 crore
- Funding
- Self-funded, no external investors claimed
Vetha Constructions
Filed 15 Apr 2025 — by email, six days later
- Proposed use
- Multi-speciality hospital (1.29 ac) + 5-star hotel (1 ac) + shopping mall (1 ac)
- Jobs claimed
- 365 direct · 250 indirect
- Investment claimed
- ~Rs. 100 crore
- Funding
- Promoter family income, claimed >Rs. 700 crore/year
Annai Trading Corporation applied first and paid a deposit. Vetha Constructions applied by email six days later for the same plot. ELCOT staff framed the choice as a policy question: “First-Come-First-Served” or a merit score based on the “nature and scale of commercial activity, employment generation, investment commitment, alignment with park objectives.” The file ends without a recorded decision. It leaves a sharper question behind: if promised jobs help decide who gets public land, who checks those promises after allotment?
The jobs number
ELCOT reports 750 current employees against a 10,000-job projection.
The department page frames 10,000 direct and 20,000 indirect jobs as a 5-year forward projection, alongside roughly Rs. 800 crore of expected investment. When my RTI asked ELCOT directly for the “job creation and occupancy projections stated at the time of inauguration/foundation,” ELCOT’s answer restated the figure without that framing: “10,000 job creation.”
Asked for current figures, ELCOT replied: “Currently, 750 plus employees have been employed in the IT Park.” That is 7.5% of the projection repeated two lines earlier. The reply does not define the comparison: it never says whether the 750 covers only the IT Tower or also land-leased manufacturers such as IAMPL, Ascent Circuits, and Hical Technologies.
What ELCOT said was unavailable
The same reply gives headline figures but not the underlying records needed to test them.
Tender records for vacant SEZ plots, last 10 years
NOT MAINTAINEDNo data is available.
Construction-completion status, per plot
NOT MAINTAINEDNo data available.
Employment figures reported by lessees, per plot
NOT MAINTAINEDNo data available.
Certified plot-wise layout map (allotted / leased / vacant)
GATED BEHIND PAYMENTNot supplied with the reply — available only on payment of Rs. 2 per page.
Put together, the reply supplies no tender data for the last decade, no per-plot construction status, and no per-plot employment figures. The one document that could help test the “50% approx.” land claim — a certified plot-wise layout map — required a separate payment. ELCOT provides the 750-employee and 50%-land figures, but not a traceable ledger behind either one.
Independent check
I used Tamil Nadu’s live cadastral map as a rough boundary check.
Most of the records above were written, filed, or published by ELCOT. For a check outside that document set, I queried TNGIS, Tamil Nadu’s public cadastral mapping service, for the live survey geometry of Viswanathapuram village (LGD code 643763) on 23 August 2026. I filtered the result to the 14 survey subdivisions named in the SEZ boundary schedule.
What TNGIS confirms
TNGIS returned geometry for 10 of the 14 boundary subdivisions, including Survey 3/1 and 3/9, both active FMB parcels. A rough area calculation across the matched polygons gives about 181.3 acres, around 4% above the old 174.47-acre figure. Given the coarse coordinates, missing subdivisions, and possibility of merged parcels, this is useful as a broad plausibility check — not independent proof of the exact acreage.
What it cannot confirm
Four subdivisions (3/3, 3/6, 3/8, 3/10) did not come back as separately mapped parcels — they may be merged into 3/1 or 3/9, or simply not yet digitized at that level. TNGIS’s FMB layer only resolves to the parent-subdivision level, so it cannot verify any single lessee’s acreage. The matched records themselves carry mixed currency — Survey 1 and 3 last updated 8 April 2025, Survey 2 on 14 January 2026 — both before most of the 2024–2025 leases this piece discusses. TNGIS is a boundary map, not a tenant ledger, and parts of it are a year or more stale.
Method note: acreage is computed from each polygon’s raw coordinates (published to 4 decimal degrees, roughly ±11 m at this latitude) using a flat equirectangular projection, not a geodesic calculation — expect a few percent of error against certified cadastral figures. This is a plausibility check, not a survey-grade re-measurement.
What I could not re-check
I attempted to re-pull fresh Encumbrance Certificates for Survey 3/1 and 3/9 to check for leases registered after the original 21-Jul-2026 search window. The Tamil Nadu Registration Department’s public EC search (TNREGINET) requires solving a CAPTCHA on every query, which cannot be automated. A fresh EC would need to be pulled manually, the same way the original two were — this piece has not been re-verified against the registrar’s office since 21-Jul-2026.
Sources
Primary documents
This piece is built from nine primary documents: an RTI reply from ELCOT under the Right to Information Act, 2005; two Encumbrance Certificates; two Gazette of India notifications; two internal ELCOT eOffice files; a 2021 ELCOT investor brochure; and the state IT department’s live ELCOSEZ page. The TNGIS cadastral query is a separate, limited cross-check.