For a Digital Life

Tamil films featuring software professionals and elderly women deftly

handling e-mail… IT has touched nearly every aspect of life in today’s

Chennai and its suburbs

Has ‘software’ replaced ‘sambar’ as Chennai’s calling card?

Sambar, not the deer, but the unique lentil based curry and filter coffee,

have for long defined the identity of Chennai. Today, sambar is not really much

sought after dish at the ‘happening’ multi-cuisine restaurants sprouting

across the city. And filter coffee is just one of the 100-odd varieties of

coffee served at the trendy coffee bar, launched by a former software programmer

three years ago.

The flavor of the nation’s fourth largest metropolis is definitely IT.

Chennai’s transformation from a staid, conservative unit to a bustling,

IT-intensive metropolis has been remarkable. The most visible landmark of the

city is Tidel Park, the one-million square feet software development hub. The

gleaming blue building, inaugurated by Prime Minister A B Vajpayee in July,

2000, has added a new dimension to the city’s IT prowess. So much so that the

road on which it stands is itself now renamed as the ‘IT highway’. For the

50-km stretch is the home of the nation’s software bigwigs such as Infosys,

TCS, PentaMedia. It is here that development centers housing thousands of

programmers in world class environs are situated.

It is not just software that is thriving in the city. In the 1980s,

Chenniites flocked to Ritchie Street, a narrow lane off the arterial Mount Road

(now officially renamed Anna Salai) to buy electronic components. Today, barely

a handful of the 200-odd shops there sell electronic goods that are not related

to computers. And given that these computers resellers on Ritchie Street cater

to other parts of South India as well, it is no wonder that are up on their feet

throughout the day taking down telephone orders for PC components.

There are very few middle class homes in Tamil Nadu, which do not have at

least one software programmer working abroad. Computer lingo is part of many

popular lyrics of Tamil films. In fact recent Tamil films have had at least a

couple of characters (apart from the leading stars) playing software

programmers! The IT sector has truly arrived in Tamil Nadu.

The city’s IT journey started in the late 1980s. The liberalization of the

engineering education sector has certainly played a major role in providing

sound base. Though the engineering industry in the state had taken off in the

1960s, there were just a dozen government-controlled engineering colleges till

mid-1980s. The high percentage of reservation in college seats (72 % for

backward and scheduled castes) too had forced hundreds of meritorious students

to turn to other pastures. But this changed after private engineering colleges

were allowed to be set up.

Today, there are some 270 engineering colleges offering IT courses with an

annual intake of 40,000 for the 60 million population. These colleges have

provided the raw material for the IT industry, no doubt. Private training

institutes like NIIT, Aptech and SSI have done their bit.

The Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi governments in the 1990s did not openly woo

IT companies. However, they made sure that the government cut out as much red

tape as possible to make it easy for IT companies to set up base here. The

aggressive wooing of automobile majors Ford and Hyundai in the mid-1990s seems

to have created a momentum to attract other industries too.

The socio-cultural factors too cannot be overlooked. Hindi films and serials

have huge following.

The glitzy shopping malls, pool bars, the multi-cuisine restaurants, the snow

bowling alleys, the drive­in theaters, the farm and beach houses along the East

Coast Road to Mahabalipuram and the amusement parks have added to charm of the

city. The face of the city has certainly changed.

The people of Tamil Nadu have embraced IT in a big way. The Cyber Cafes are

doing booming business. The Internet telephone providers too are likely to do

equally well in the coming years. The country’s largest ISP, Sify is based in

the city. Age and tradition have not come in the way of even middle class

housewives enrolling for basic computer courses in droves. Elderly women adept

at handling email, to communicate with their sons and grandsons in the Silicon

Valley are not uncommon.

The unique entrepreneurial spirit of the state too is a major factor in the

success story. People have been quick to spot the emerging trends- be it the

engineering industry in the 1960s, textiles and machinery in 1970s, finance and

plantations in the 1980s and IT in the 1990s. And now bioinformatics, this too

is gaining ground in the state.

N Suresh in Chennai