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Largest Single Building Office in India - ICICI Gachibowli

When the countrys largest captive office building, and perhaps one of the largest in the world, opens its doors for business some time around March next year, it wont be amchi Mumbai or saddi Dilli that it will call home. Private banking major ICICI Banks upcoming landmark building, which is well on its way to setting and breaking several world records, will be housed right here in mana Hyderabad.

For starters, ICICI Banks regional hub,coming up at an investment of about Rs 1,000 crore, will be housed in a dense building which is the first of its kind in Asia and perhaps the world as well.

The building has a built-up area of 4 million square feet, the green concrete building is tipped to be Indias largest captive office building and the 18th largest in the worldin terms of floor area in a single building. Believe it or not, at a whopping 5.5 lakh tonne, the 70-metre high building will outweigh the iconic, 110-storied World Trade Center that weighed 5 lakh tonne before it was felled in the 9/11 attacks.

At 18,500 tonne of structural steel, it guzzled two and a half times more steel than the 7,300 tonne that went into erecting the iconic Eiffel Tower. It will has enough electrical cables and wires (6,000 km) to go halfway around the middle of the earth, which will power the building.And at 342 metre in length and 88 metre in breadth, it can easily accommodate four Airbus A380 aircraft parked side by side.

To put it into perspective, especially for cricket fans, space available in each floor of the building would equal Kolkatas famous Eden Gardens cricket ground, thanks to a floor plate of 1.5 lakh square feet. This bank hub will also sport the countrys single longest escalator with a length of 14.4 metres in its cavernous 20-metre high atrium.

If thats not all, apart from enough office space to accommodate 22,000 employees, the building will also have a huge parking space into which 4,500 two wheelers, 1,500 four wheelers and 11 buses can drive in. In addition to this, there will be 80 elevators and 60 escalators to take care of in-house transportation apart from food courts, restaurants and other support services.

This 20-storey building, being touted as Hyderabads second tallest, will tower over its other neighbours like Franklin Templeton, Cognizant, Flagstone Underwriting Support Services, IRDA and IIRM in the APIIC financial district coming up adjacent to the IT hub of Gachibowli.

Interestingly, if this was built about eight years ago, at 4 million square feet it would have alone equalled the total office space that was available in Hyderabad then. Independent estimates put the total office space available in Hyderabad currently at about 30 million square feet.