Andhra,Tamil Nadu and Kerala vie for InfoTech investment from Silicon Valley
AP, TN, Kerala compete for IT investment
Monica Uppal
Stanford (California): Three southern Indian states competing for information-technology (IT) investments vied for the attention of Silicon Valley firms, plugging the progress they have made and the advantages they offer.
Officials from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala also met start-up firms, ancillary services and research organisations and visited technology parks for an understanding of the requirements to develop IT back home.
"Interaction with people of the Silicon Valley has brought to our attention their amazing entrepreneurship, venture capitalism and stress on least government interference," said Tamil Nadu IT Secretary Damodaran Prakash while winding up the seminar titled 'India Information Technology' at Stanford University. The three officials were here as part of the university's IT policymakers-in-residence programme.
J Satyanarayana represented Andhra Pradesh while Aruna Sounderrajan was Kerala's representative.
Prakash said Tamil Nadu has a strong and stable government with a responsive pro-active administration and progressive IT policy. The decision-making process is investor-friendly and transparent. Skilled manpower is available in abundance and, with no unrest, the labour environment is obviously cordial.
Tamil Nadu is taking innovative e-governance initiatives and is constantly upgrading infrastructure, Prakash said. "Tamil Nadu is one of the few states which is fairly comfortably placed on the power availability front unless all of you decide to go back and set up shop there," he quipped.
The state has a literacy rate of 70 per cent, he pointed out, and its capital Chennai has the highest density of software professionals in India. The State Industries Promotion Corporation of Tamil Nadu is setting up a 1,000-acre IT Park at Siruseri near Chennai which will provide land with the required infrastructure to companies for locating their own complexes for IT-enabled services and software development, he added.
In Andhra Pradesh, Satyanarayana said, the IT initiatives include attractive investments, provision of infrastructure and other incentives. He listed various projects like HiTec City, the Indian Institute of Information Techonology (IIIT) and video conferencing private initiatives by Worldtel, Philips and Citrix as feathers in his state's cap, the California newspaper India-West reported.
HiTec City, outside Hyderabad, is being branded India's largest software park and a workplace that turns infrastructure and economy into strategic advantages for the entrepreneur. Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu is recognised as one of the most enterprising in the IT field, which is considered his forte.
On e-governance goals, Satyanarayana said the state is trying to provide better citizen services, improve internal efficiency, enforce law better, foster dissemination of education and information, and aid the promotion and extension of facilities.
Sounderrajan, in his talk entitled 'Advantage Kerala', said Kerala is the most advanced society in India in terms of literacy, urbanisation, social infrastructure, education, health facilities, transport and communication, growth of financial institutions, life expectancy, infant mortality and birth rates. Kerala is an egalitarian society with advanced telecommunication and high levels of media penetration.
The world's greenest technopolis, Technopark, is located at Thiruvananthapuram, Sounderrajan said. The fully functional park has 40 companies, state-of-the-art infrastructure and worldwide connectivity. The state also has the highest phone density, five private Internet service providers and is in the process of enhancing digital communication, he added.
Kerala has a comprehensive IT policy to promote e-governance and IT deployment and is working towards a single window clearance system. To bring IT benefits to the masses, 1,300 local self-government institutions are moving towards e-governance.
India Abroad News Service |
