While the information technology (IT) revolution has brought laurels to the country, Uttar Pradesh (leaving out the NCR) has so far not benefited much from this growing sector.
Because of a lack of opportunities in the state, much of the IT talent has to migrate to other parts of the country. About 12 per cent of the IT professionals working at various levels in different companies in the country are from UP and the state alone produces about 75,000 engineers yearly.
A host of companies like HCL, TCS, NewGen, Xansa, Birlasoft, Adobe, TATA CMC limited and Infogain have a presence in UP but only in the NCR region. Mainly due to infrastructure constraints, like in other sectors, IT has also shown a slow pace of development.
In a conference held in the city recently organised by Nassscom, experts deliberated on developing other cities of the state to emerge as IT hubs. The one-day seminar was titled “Building Lucknow as an IT-BPO Destination”.
According to the Nasscom & AT Kearney report, Lucknow ranks in the best space after the leading seven cities in the IT sector of the country.
Lucknow has been categorised as the "Challenger", which is the best category after the top seven existing IT destinations. This is an encouraging development where Lucknow has been bracketed with Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Bhubaneshwar, Cochin, Thiruvananthapuram, Nagpur, Coimbatore, Jaipur and Indore.
The study was conducted by collecting and analysing data about the 50 locations on over 100 metrics broke down into key parameters such as knowledge pool availability and skill set assessment, infrastructure, social and living environment, enabling business environment, government support and operating. Given these parameters, Lucknow featured in the second best segment of a ‘challenger’ segment under which the city ranks quite high by way of its intrinsic appeal as an IT-BPO destination.
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Despite these inherent natural advantages, investment in IT still eludes the state (besides NCR).
“Mostly its perception that the state seems to showcase over the years,” Dr. Ganesh Natarajan, Chairman NASSCOM and Deputy Chairman and Managing Director, Zensar told Business Standard.
The scenario of political unrest, changing state governments, lack of implementation of policies, law and order situation, etc seem to work against the interests of the investors in general.
“There is this urgent need to bridge the gap between policy making and its implementation at the earliest. The actual execution must penetrate to the ground level,” reiterate Som Mittal, President, NASSCOM.
“Especially with regards the IT companies, they seem to operate on different lines altogether. They cannot be bracketed with other industries and made to skip around the government departments,” informed a senior official of an IT company.
Elaborating on UP, Natarajan further said that the state has many ‘positives’ to its credit like existence of basic infrastructure, education and other facilities, what is needed is to ‘market’ these credits nationally and internationally to bring in company investments.
“If IIT Kanpur can maintain itself and be the best seat of IT education in UP for students worldwide, then why other industries can not sustain here,” questioned Pawan Kumar, Chief Executive Officer, Sahara Next.
According to Kumar, in UP the intentions of policy makers are good, policies are good but the only problem that exits is that they are not implemented.
“There is a need to enlarge UP’s presence besides NOIDA,” added Mittal.
Experts believe that Lucknow is the best option in UP besides the NCR which may be developed as an IT destination.
The ‘tehzeeb’ of Lucknow may be termed as the practical form of customer service. The inherent warmth in speech that the natives of the city have is the most important aspect required to deal with customers worldwide.
It is this tehzeeb which can be formulated to have the best people in customer services.
In order to make Lucknow and other cities as the destination next for IT companies, experts believe that the foremost step is to execute the IT Policy the state had bailed out in 2004 and put in place a ‘focus cell’ to redress the grievances of IT companies.
Once this is done, the state could work upon marketing its strengths across the country and at international forums.
“Speaking and focusing about what the state has to offer at various occasions like national and international seminars etc will help deter the misconception and the wrong perception that UP has outside,” Mittal said.