Why Bengaluru will always be India’s Silicon Garden

There’s something about Bengaluru. The city has always managed to stay ahead. It was the first city in Asia to get electrified and hence the first to have electric lamps on the streets. While it had great weather and greenery (earning it the nickname Pensioners’ Paradise), it also had a great college and PSU ecosystem. There was always enough talent waiting for it to be tapped.

The state government in the early 1990s went all out to lay the foundations for thriving software and tech parks. SM Krishna became Chief Minister in 1999 and made Karnataka a leader in e-governance. The local agencies did a GPS mapping to help them understand water-land-distribution problems. The Bhoomi project under Krishna digitized land records that helped the people in buying, selling and registering land. This was one of many projects.

The Y2K crisis in 1999 led India becoming an IT services superpower and here too Bengaluru took the lead with the likes of Infosys and Wipro. (Infosys Co-Founder Nandan Nilekani headed the Aadhaar project which kicked off Digital India.) Soon Bengaluru had the largest pool of talent when it came to software engineers, leading global media to call it India’s Silicon Valley.

Then came the startup revolution. Here too Bengaluru took the lead and became the ideal hosting ground for startups to grow and prosper. The city rightly lays claim to be the Startup Hub of India with thousands of startups and close to 50 unicorns, the best performance among all the cities. Here are some of them: Flipkart, Swiggy, PhonePe, Zerodha, Paytm, Licious, Ola, BYJU'S, Unacademy, Cult.fit, CRED, Rapido, Ather Energy, Bigbasket, Ola Electric, Porter, Krutim, CoinSwitch, Vedantu, Groww, Meesho, Razorpay, along with India’s first InMobi.

The GCC era

India is No. 1 in IT Services and No. 3 in startups. Now there is a new trend of GCCs or Global Capability Centres. Top tech companies of the world are making a beeline to India to set up GCCs and drawing talent. While GCCs are doing great innovation and in effect working for their own countries, the talent is local, and their skills will be handy when they work in other companies that are directly part of the Indian ecosystem. There’s another interesting fact: More than half of the GCCs of India are based out of Bangalore.

Meanwhile the tech industry in Bengaluru continues to expand in all four directions in the city. While there are 60 odd tech parks, which are a lot, 80 more are being planned. Bengaluru seems to have a great appetite for all thing tech and there are no signs that the city is reaching a saturation point.