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