(This story originally appeared in on Mar 24, 2016)

BENGALURU: On September 29, 2014, at the Taj Palace hotel in New Delhi, Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had a hush-hush meeting. Many of the CM’s closest aides were not informed about the meeting, and Microsoft made it clear to those present that nothing on the matter being discussed should leak.Microsoft was then planning a massive new campus involving an investment of $1billion in five years. It had scouted the globe and had pretty much made up itsmind that it had to be in Bengaluru . The idea was to consolidate many of its India operations in that campus and also provide for significant expansion. The 30-minute meeting between Nadella and Siddaramaiah was seen by some as “almost” sealing the deal, though Microsoft still had to internally tie up several loose ends.“The meeting was kept a top secret, so much so that the item was not marked on Nadella’s calendar and nor were the minutes of the meeting recorded. They didn’t want to leave any trail behind. Rightly so because the stakes were very high, given that the proposed investment opportunity was $1 billion and with the potential to create 5,000-7,000 jobs,” said a source who was then close to the development.Nadella was then just seven months into his job as CEO and was scripting a turnaround story for Microsoft, restructuring the company around cloud services like Azure, cutting jobs and writing-down the Nokia handset unit. It has been over a year since that meeting, and there's still no word on the campus. Microsoft declined to comment on the story . When contacted on the matter, Karnataka IT secretary V Manjula, who took over the position in July last year, said, “No such proposal has come to my notice at the time of taking charge.“In India, Microsoft has its biggest presence in Hyderabad. The 54-acre Hyderabad campus houses research and development, IT, and global services. Bengaluru hosts Microsoft Research, a development centre, a global technical support centre and Microsoft Ventures and some of these are in different locations. Microsoft has offices in 10 cities in India, and employs 7,000 people here.