 "Priyank Kharge")
Karnataka, home to Bengaluru, India’s new economy hub is holding its flagship technology event ITe.biz from Monday. This year the event comes at a time when Indian IT industry is facing challenges due to disruption in technologies - automation and artificial intelligence and concerns in their main export market - US, where President-elect Donald Trump has been elected on an anti-immigration and anti-outsourcing plank. Closer home, startups, which had emerged as a major employment generator are struggling to raise funds to scale their business. Priyank Kharge, the state IT minister explains in an interview with Business Standard why Bengaluru is reinventing in a changing environment to attract business and the relevance of the event. Edited Excerpts:
Bengaluru has image issues over traffic, lack of infrastructure and in the last few months - bandhs. How are you convincing international investors to come to the city and expand investments?
Every city has its fair share of flaws, it is just not Bengaluru. If you have an apple to apple comparison, Bengaluru has lesser problems than any other city in India or outside also. Even Silicon Valley, they also have their own set of problems, the fight between insiders and outsiders, infrastructure problems. London has traffic problems, they, in fact, have congestion taxes to get you inside, New York has a traffic problem, crimes are very high in the suburbs. In India, you know what happened in Gurugram, three days they were stuck in traffic jams. Once rain caved in the entire Hyderabad infrastructure and with one rain Mumbai and Chennai come to a halt. We are far better than any of the other cities. The (violence over) Cauvery issue, that was more of an emotional outburst once. After that three supreme court judgements have come and nothing happened. It did make a difference in terms of image for investors. But every city goes through that, not just Bengaluru. The thing is the resilience of the city, it bounces back quickly. It took less than 24 hours to get back to normal. More than infrastructure and more than all this I think what the companies and investors look at is the overall conducive environment in the ecosystem. By default, we have that, whether it is skilled , whether it is knowledge, whether it is our policies and whether it is our approach to the investors. I am not escaping from the fact that we can improve. Definitely, there is a lot of scope for improvement and we are doing it. As of now investors do not have heavy concerns on infrastructure because the ecosystem which is prevalent in Bengaluru is highly policy-driven. They do raise concerns about traffic but besides that we are perfect.
How are you trying to build policies to take the success of Bengaluru to other cities of the state?
It is quite natural for that to happen in any country. There has to be one anchor (city), it becomes very unfair to say that why is IT not throughout the state, it can not be. For example, why are cement factories in North Karnataka, it is because natural resources are found there. Why is Mangaluru a port and not the other 320 km (of coastline)? It becomes difficult. There has to be one anchor which is Bengaluru and the government policies do help us to take technology outside also. We have something called the New Age Incubation Network, where we allow technology to thrive even at the bottom of the pyramid at colleges and the results have been amazing. We have our IT parks in Kalburgi, Hubli, Mysore, Shimoga wherein we are allowing entrepreneurs to come up and we are also coming up with new incubation centres and incubators in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities. That Bangalore has IT, most of these IT people who are here are from outside Bengaluru in the sense from Kalburgi, Hubli, Dharwad and Mysore. Now, they are trying to do their own startups there itself, one validation for that is Udupi and Mangaluru startups got funded close to $30 million in the last one year. It is happening, it can not be a rush. It has to be a constant and sustained.
Fifteen years ago, the IT event was to attract fresh investment in Bengaluru. How relevant is the ITe.Biz today?
Even I had the same question when officials came to me with the ITe.biz event plan when I became the minister (in June). We had just completed invest Karnataka to attract investments for industries. The IT industry has matured. Then my team and I decided that we need to define the future of technology in the event. We are talking about artificial intelligence, robotics, we are bringing in gaming, animation and also have special thrust on startups. We are signing up a collaborative Bengaluru Boston Biotechnology corridor partnership.This itself becomes a game changer.
One of the concerns of domestic companies is that most of these events are hijacked by multinational companies and they do not get a platform with the state?
We are ensuring that everyone gets a platform. Zoho, it is an Indian company, all they did was tweet to me and now they are our partners. Bhavish (Aggarwal of Ola) just met me once. It is the prime responsibility of the government to ensure the success of domestic companies. Of course, we need the big daddies and all these MNC’s. So far we are considered the services cluster, I want Bengaluru to be the knowledge and IP cluster. This, I can do only by ensuring that startups and domestic companies flourish.
With the current situation where there is a slowdown in the IT business and most companies and Nasscom cutting their guidance how will the event help the companies?
The event is important for the state on two fronts, one is to showcase the policy itself as ours is one of the unique policies in the country. The idea is to ensure we develop newer verticals, animation, gaming and our policies are compliant with the emerging technologies. Defence electronics, is big for us aerospace is big, cyber security is big for us. The event is crucial we will be defining the next big direction to take for all these sectors. Irrespective of any organisation saying there is a dip, yes maybe there is a dip. As a government, we can not stop what we have to do.
The third day is themed around the startups what is that the startups can take back from the event?
If there are good startups they can partner with us. We are open to startups to validate their ideas. We give them mentorship, accounting and legal help. No other government does that. We are creating an ecosystem wherein either they take the help from the government, or we become the bridge between two private entities. The idea is just not to come showcase and go. There will be networking. But the bigger thing is if there is something that they can help the government because the government itself is a big consumer.
