Vidhya Sivaramakrishnan, Chennai
Mint
Chennai has evolved into a city with traditional values but a modern outlook where you find software professionals carrying thair saadham (curd rice) in their tiffin boxes and eating it at the posh food courts of their offices, says C. Chandramouli, planning and development secretary of Tamil Nadu.
Having attracted many auto mobile and electronics companies, Tamil Nadu is now being increasingly looked at as an attractive IT destination. Chandramouli, who was the state’s IT secretary until recently, says in an interview that the large number of graduates that the state produces every year, along with its work ethic, is drawing big names in the IT industry to Chennai and Tamil Nadu.
Excerpts:
How do you view the growth of industries as well as IT in the south?
Chennai has always been the gateway of south, and when you look at the Look-East Policy, we are the gateway of South-East Asia also. So in that way, Chennai assumes a very strategic position, both geopolitically as well as the kind of infrastructure that people look for investment.
When I talk of infrastructure, the first and foremost asset that Chennai or Tamil Nadu has is its human resources (HR). We are adding about a lakh engineering graduates every year and three lakh of non-engineering graduates. These people are English-speaking, trainable and, more importantly, their work ethics, which everyone talks about.
What more does Chennai need to attract further investments or is its story successful enough for people to flock in?
No, we realize that it’s not successful enough... The major problem is the quality of education, though we have numbers in place, we don’t have the quality in place. And that is why we have started the IT Academy.
The IT Academy doesn’t look at students. It looks at developing faculty, developing curriculum, developing content so that we can equip the colleges, which are in the private sector.
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