India, July 18 -- During the campaign for Lok Sabha polls in 2024, Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) chief Sharad Pawar narrated a lesser-known story that has now gained renewed relevance. In the late 1990s, the state was exploring locations to set up a sugar factory in the Hinjewadi region, then a sleepy village on Pune's outskirts. Pawar, who was the Union minister for defence and had a growing influence in Maharashtra politics, persuaded local farmers to give up their land not for sugarcane cultivation or a factory, but for something he believed was the future - information technology. The idea, he told them, was to build a new kind of economy. The locals agreed. And that land, stretching over hundreds of hectares, would...