A Tale of two cities

The ongoing debate on whether India or China would be the one to achieve

Software Superpower status in the next ten years presented two excellent

examples for me in the space of five days and left me more confused than ever.

Let me present the cases for the readers of this column to judge….

Sunday October 20–Gwalior, India. A galaxy of IT CEOs–Arun Kumar,

Rajendra Pawar, Pradeep Gupta, Rajiv Kaul, Raman Roy and a handful of

industrialists–Kalyani, Bharatram etc–assembled under the banner of the

Confederation of Indian Industry for the launch of the Srimant Madhavrao Scindia

Countermagnet city. A journey not without travails to get there as the MP

Government gladly offered the services of the state aircraft, but a destination

truly rewarding, just to see the passion of the young Morgan Stanley Investment

Banker turned politician Jyotiraditya Scindia and veteran CM par excellence

Digvijay Singh and their dream to make the new city a destination of choice for

the ITeS boom. The intentions are great and the vision compelling and all it

will now need is a strong sense of Public-Private partnership to see a new venue

for all IT majors and new entrepreneurs.

Thursday October 24–Zhuhai, China–the Vice Chairman of the Chinese

Provincial Communist Party and a galaxy of luminaries from Hong Kong, China and

India were witness to the launch of Zensar’s Development facilities in China.

Zhuhai is a place which is not vision but reality with huge Government

Investments made upfront in creating a work environment and related

infrastructure, housing and leisure facilities that would rival the best that

Silicon Valley has to offer. The commitment of the Government is awesome, from

Pudong in Shanghai to Zhuhai and I am told there are at least forty such

townships in the making.

So what are the points of comparison between these two cities, Gwalior and

Zhuhai and at a larger level between India and China and their software

aspirations? The vision is there, amongst the Government and the CEOs alike and

while India may have the temporal advantage of having the world’s second

largest pool of English speaking technical manpower, China has an amazing

capability to build Technology destinations that have "magnetic"

attraction for global investors. If we do get our act in place, as a country and

as individual destinations, we could well lose the IT war the way we seem to

have lost the manufacturing one to China.

What should the country do to sustain its advantages and maintain the gap

that presently separates us from other wannabes like China, Philippines etc?

First, the realization that five overgrown cities cannot be a sustainable

superpower proposition–other cities need to provide world class facilities to

ensure that incumbent Software and Services firms in the big cities are

confident of establishing large facilities in these towns? Three imperatives

that every city builder and political chief must follow are:

• Build infrastructure ahead of marketing; and

• Provide incentives in the form of low or no rentals,
  
  subsidized work and recreation facilities and access to well-trained human
  
  resources; and

• Finally, take a leaf from prospective clients and do
  
  aggressive marketing. The world cannot beat a track to a new destination if
  
  the only top of mind recall continues to be for Bangalore, Hyderabad and one
  
  or two other cities. Hopefully, this article serves to spark a bit of
  
  awareness but it will need marketers of the Gwalior brand to be as capable
  
  and successful in a smaller sphere as the late Dewang Mehta and Minister
  
  Mahajan have been in creating India Software Inc.

Ganesh Natarajan



The author is the global CEO of Zensar Technologies