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IT in India

Narayanaswamy, e-mail

This regards the Japanese Prime Minister, Mr. Yoshiro Mori's visit to infotech companies in Bangalore. One hopes this opens the eyes of policy-makers in India.

While the Japanese, Germans and others are willing to open their doors to Indian engineers, there is no attempt by the Indian authorities to motivate their engineers to stay in India.

There is no development in the social infrastructure from the potential IT wealth generated in India, which is used to develop social infrastructure in the developed world. Engineers and scientists from premier Indian institutions are thriving in many in stitutions in the developed world. It will be instructive for the policy-makers to see why most India-trained engineers rush out of India.

The consequences of the current bad planning seem disastrous. Most of these are because of bad management of the IT boom in India.

Positive aspects of the boom: It has generated employment. India is an important part of the world IT industry now. Its major role is as a cheap manpower source.

Negative aspects of the boom: The developed world is trying to make the best of the apparent disenchantment among the professionally qualified Indians. The word `apparent' is used because Germany's current Green Card policy to attract Indians was based o n the belief that the latter would turn up in numbers to run away from India.

Mismanagement of the boom: The chief factor that influences people's decisions on where they live is the quality of life. Sadly, the revenue generated from technological progress in India is not channeled into developing social infrastructure. This is ev ident from the past experiences with industrial estates, export processing zones and, now, IT parks. The chief drawback of the system is that IT parks have been created within the proximity of large metropolises. This leads to other ``sub'' failures and subsequent migration out of India.

A clear case is Bangalore, from where many IT professionals have started migrating out of India. Bangalore is a city with its infrastructure ripped at the seams by an industrial estate and, recently, an IT park. These two technological hubs are great wea lth generators and have attracted a range of manpower from the highly-qualified to the labourers. These have also created a wide gap between the quality of life associated with different strata of society.

Can technocentres (IT parks and industrial estates) be set up away from metropolises, so as to create an upcoming set of metros with better infrastructure and futuristic planning? While this will not generate immediate wealth, it will be much more profit able in the long run.