Life at Reliance Jio HQ: The place where all the Jio action happens

Reliance Jio is headquartered in Reliance’s sprawling Navi Mumbai campus. Spread across 550 acres, the campus also houses some divisions of Reliance Retail.

The campus houses as many as 18,000-20,000 employees, of which at least 60% are those who work for Jio alone. Two of the biggest and most modern buildings have been occupied by Jio in the campus.

Mukesh Ambani and Akash Ambani reach here almost every day on their private helicopters, cutting across the otherwise 2 hour long traffic from their home Antilla, situated in the heart of Mumbai. The campus has 2 specially designed helipads for the time when top management visits from Reliance Group’s Headquarters at Nariman Point.

Reliance Jio is wholly and solely Akash Ambani’s project. He is at the headquarters almost every day, looking into and putting into shape its core functions. Workers have said, Jr Ambani is not only very approachable, but also understands the requirements of technology in today’s day and age very well. He is infact like ‘any other young employee’.

Handset manufacturers like Samsung, OnePlus, Xiaomi, Huawei, Micromax and even Google, all have designated work areas. Almost every handset manufacturer worth their names have set shops at the Rel Jio headquarters to test their handsets for compatibility with Jio’s SIMs and apps.

Every Wednesday, Mukesh Ambani holds a meeting with Jio’s leaders that also include zonal heads and of course his elder son, Akash Ambani, who is spearheading the entire project for his father and Manoj Modi, senior Ambani’s long trusted aide. The meetings mostly begin at 10pm in the night, after all other work has been taken care of and more often than not carry on the entire night!

The facility also has basketball and football facilities, in addition to a fully functional gym and food trucks next to almost every building serving up delicious fare that include Chinese, Mexican to south Indian. Every building in the campus has a cafeteria on the first floor, however given all are vegetarian and how the Koreans and Chinese were having issues eating all vegetarian fare, the main Jio building now has a non-vegetarian cafeteria on its first floor-the only one in the entire campus.

Right in the middle of the sprawling campus is Jio's crown jewel, the innovation centre, a single-storey building, which houses all of Jio's s state-of-the-art technology. Everything that Jio is developing and launching is housed in this building, making it the single most closely protected property inside the campus. While I did get an extensive tour of the entire innovation centre, pictures were prohibited for obvious reasons, though I did manage to click this one, which is the centre's Twitter wall, an entire wall that showcases real-time updates of activities on Jio's Twitter page. This is right at the entrance of the building, the trade secrets are in a massive room just behind this wall! This is also the place that people like Tim Cook, Satyan Nadella and Sundar Pichai have been given guided tours of every time they visited Mumbai.