Mumbai: Kerala's Technopark has emerged the country's largest IT park, with total built-up area of 2.2 million sq ft, following the inauguration of the 850,000 sq ft Tejaswani building by chief minister V S Achuthanandan.

The new building has 12 floors and is perhaps the single largest building in the country's IT industry. The new addition pushes ITPL in Bangalore to second place and Tidal Park in Chennai to the third.

The Technopark campus, 12 km from Thiruvananthapuram, already had 1.5 million sq ft built-up area. The park houses 110 companies and employs around 15,000.

The park has six other buildings - Nila, Bhavani, Gayatri, Chandragiri, Pampa and Periyar - in addition to buildings constructed by IT companies.

The Technopark will see more growth with three companies building their own campuses there, adding another 800,000 sq ft. The Mumbai-based Leela Group is also building a campus and would take up 500,000 sq ft.

Software industry association NASSCOM president Kiran Karnik asked the Kerala government to work toward achieving total e-literacy by 2010. He also wanted the government to set up an IT corridor from Thiruvananthapuram to Kochi.

K R Jyothilal, special secretary (IT), said the new IT policy envisaged distributed development of IT infrastructure by developing knowledge cities in districts along with the expansion of Technopark and Infopark at Kochi in a hub and spoke model.

N Radhakrishnan Nair, CEO of the campus, said expansion of the second, third and fourth phases of the park were in the pipeline.