The Hindu : Marketing a weak link in TN wooing big names

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Nov 13, 2002

Southern States

Southern States - Tamil Nadu

Marketing a weak link in TN wooing big names

By Our Special Correspondent

CHENNAI Nov. 12. Tamil Nadu does not "talk much'' of its achievements in Information Technology or its unique features as an investment destination. That is why some of the big names are missing here, consultants and officials told an international IT conference.

A couple of other States were on top of the "recall'' list with the world's IT community mainly because of their marketing strategies; not because they were better than Tamil Nadu.

Hard selling the State at the two-day seminar organised here by the OCED (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) Development Centre, the Central and State Governments, they said every fourth engineer in India graduated from an institute in Tamil Nadu. Social cohesion was a fact of life here, power abundant and the number of mandays lost in agitations among the least. Added to these, the State was ranked the third best in terms of Human Development Index.

The Chief Minister, Jayalalithaa, herself set the stage for promoting the State, detailing its achievements in various fields and the fact that it had taken the lead in many IT initiatives.

Both the `hard' and `soft' indices were comparable with the best in the country and the State had as many as 10 identified `clusters' of economic and industrial activity. Even Maharastra - despite its larger industrial base - had only six such clusters, said a Ma Foi representative (a management consultancy firm), quoting a London School of Economics study.

The conference discussed the fact that the IT revolution and attendant prosperity should not be confined to islands in the country; there was need for spreading the benefits among all sections. While academics led by Ted Tschang from the Singapore Management University said that unless the technology proved economically sustainable, there would be no way of its benefits reaching out to the poor and to those in villages.

A few other academics, including Nirvikar Singh from the University of California, U.S., said what mattered was an ``enabling environment.''

The Government had to make available infrastructure and the rest should be left to the local entrepreneur.

The Tamil Nadu IT Secretary, Vivek Harinarain, said the model in the State had proved sustainable.

The only facility being provided to the entrepreneur was a loan from a local bank. No other sops were being given. Despite this, there was a good response to the idea of setting up of computer kiosks and Internet booths.

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