Bangalore infrastructure frustrating, says Haque

The debate on the lack of adequate infrastructure in the city of Bangalore is increasingly resonating in the boardrooms of US enterprises.

Pramod Haque, managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners, acknowledged as the world's number one venture capitalist and called 'Man with the Midas Touch' for identifying and investing in cutting-edge technology firms, is advising his investee companies to do a rethink of having a development centre in Bangalore.

"I do not know how Bangalore is going to cope with this tremendous growth. Outsourcing is increasing by the day and something real serious needs to be done here in Bangalore to take advantage of this boom. We keep hearing about the problems of infrastructure in Bangalore and we are advising our companies to have a look at other centres such as Hyderabad, Poona, Gurgaon near Delhi and Chennai," said Haque.

He further said that it is amazing how MNCs such as IBM and Oracle are bullish about outsourcing to India and Bangalore is the top on their list of destinations. "It is high-time the infrastructure concerns are addressed," he added.

Haque also felt that increasingly it will be seen that Bangalore will have to share the pie it has been almost wholly attracting to itself.

"We are also advising our companies to open one centre in Bangalore and parallely operate the second unit in one of the other cities so as to mitigate the risks of lack of infrastructure," said Haque.

Commenting on the outsourcing debate in the US, he said that there has been no let-down in the amount of work being outsourced and all the debate is politically motivated.

"A number of our investee companies have been opening development centres in India and we have not faced a single problem in this," he noted.