Tuesday, September 02, 2008

LUCKNOW EQUALS CHANDIGARH IN IT: NASSCOM

Shruti Srivastava, New Delhi, Lucknow
Business Standard

While the information technology (IT) revolution has brought laurels to the country, Uttar Pradesh (leaving out the NCR) has so far not benefited much from this growing sector.

Because of a lack of opportunities in the state, much of the IT talent has to migrate to other parts of the country. About 12 percent of the IT professionals working at various levels in different companies in the country are from UP and the state alone produces about 75,000 engineers yearly.

A host of companies like HCL, TCS, NewGen, Xansa, Birlasoft, Adobe, TATA CMC limited and Infogain have a presence in UP but only in the NCR region. Mainly due to infrastructure constraints, like in other sectors, IT has also shown a slow pace of development.

In a conference held in the city recently organised by Nassscom, experts deliberated on developing other cities of the state to emerge as IT hubs. The one-day seminar was titled “Building Lucknow as an IT-BPO Destination”.

According to the Nasscom & AT Kearney report, Lucknow ranks in the best space after the leading seven cities in the IT sector of the country.

Lucknow has been categorised as the "Challenger", which is the best category after the top seven existing IT destinations. This is an encouraging development where Lucknow has been bracketed with Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Bhubaneshwar, Cochin, Thiruvananthapuram, Nagpur, Coimbatore, Jaipur and Indore.

The study was conducted by collecting and analysing data about the 50 locations on over 100 metrics broke down into key parameters such as knowledge pool availability and skill set assessment, infrastructure, social and living environment, enabling business environment, government support and operating. Given these parameters, Lucknow featured in the second best segment of a ‘challenger’ segment under which the city ranks quite high by way of its intrinsic appeal as an IT-BPO destination.

Despite these inherent natural advantages, investment in IT still eludes the state (besides NCR).

0 comments: