Handling of IT boom

Sir, - This refers to an article in TheHindu, relating to the Japanese Premier's visit to Infotech companies in Bangalore. I hope this opens the eyes of the policy makers in India. While the Japanese, Germans and others are willing to open their door to Indian engineers, there is no attempt by our authorities to attract them to stay in India. There is no development in the social infrastructure from the potential IT wealth generated in India. The IT wealth generated in India is used to develop social infrastructure in the developed world. Hasn't our nation seen such a manpower drain before. Indian engineers from our premier institutions are thriving in many institutions in the developed world. It will be instructive for our policy makers to see why most India trained engineers rushed out of the country. The consequences of the current bad planning seem disastrous. I will try to point out a few. Most of these are because of bad management of the IT boom in India.

Positive aspects of the boom: It has generated employment. India is an important part of the world IT industry now. Its major role is as a cheap manpower source.

Negative aspects: The developed world is trying to make the best of the apparent disenchantment among the professionally qualified Indians. I use the word apparent because the current Green Card policy in Germany to attract Indians was based on the belief that Indians would turn up in loads. That this has not happened is due to the fact that the country in question is Germany and economics. It sadly has nothing to do with India, patriotism or attractive policies.

Mismanagement of the boom: The only thing that attracts people to stay in a place is quality of life. Sadly, the revenue generated from technological progress in India is not channelised into developing social infrastructure. This is evident from the past experiences with industrial estates, export processing zones, and now, IT parks.

The main failure of the system is to have created IT parks within the proximity of large metropolises. This leads to other ``sub'' failures and subsequent migration out of India. A clear suffering case of this is Bangalore from where many IT professionals have started migrating out of India. Bangalore is a city with its infrastructure ripped at the seams by an industrial estate and recently by an IT park. These two technological ventures are wealth generators and have attracted a range of manpower from the highly qualified to the labourer.

This has also created a wide gap between the quality of life associated with different strata of society. There are some areas which are admittedly posh and where the lifestyle is akin to the lifestyle in the developed world. On the other hand, there are many parts where the lifestyle is of an utterly low quality. This big gap has created social tensions on a small scale. The havenots are envious of the haves. The haves can get what they want because of the wealth they possess. This also fosters corruption among the civil servants (at many levels) which leads to frustration among the haves. Most of the haves are technocrats and entrepreneurs who would rather go to greener pastures where they can flourish. These pastures exist only outside India which leads to migration.

The main reason for this is the mega failures of the planners (politicians, bureaucrats, academic advisors) who are shortsighted only to see the amount of foreign exchange that comes in and not the net amount of wealth that is lost.

What can be: Can't technocentres (IT parks, industrial estates, etc.) be distributed away from metropolises so as to create an upcoming set of metropolises with better infrastructure, and futuristic planning? While this will not generate immediate wealth, it will be much more profitable in the long run.

N. S. Narayanaswamy,

Munich

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