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that article talks about parks for small and micro IT enterprises. perhaps a welcome move away from the constant focus on large IT-walas and the big $ investments. but beyond IT, bengaluru used to host many small and micro enterprises in general engineering. how about support for that? at some level shouldn't the focus be on entrepreneurship? i hope as an industry member as an entrepreneur, devesh can start a dialogue about the health of the general industry in bangalore.

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I think we need to seriously embrace the motto -- "slower growth for smarter management". This will sound like sacrilege but I would not be unhappy if there is a slow down in the inflow of new projects. Assuming we have capable leaders, a slow growth period of 3 years will allow our fair city to partially recover from the wounds inflicted on it.

tarlesubba makes an excellent point about promoting small and microenterprises. The city's attitude towards the small entrpreneur has to change. I have been in the process of growing the Bangalore office of my small US-based company for the past 2 years. I have a couple of young engineers who think like entrepreneurs and I can see the struggle they go through to resist the pull of the big IT companies. Life for them would be so much easier if they joined the Honeywells of the world -- better chances of getting a loan, fatter pay packets, better matrimonial prospects (!) etc. This entire eco-system of Bangalore is geared towards the large IT companies and that is a tragedy because innovation will not really come from there.

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Hi TS, it was a great seminar organized by the Infrastructure Committee of BCIC yesterday on PPP. I head the committee. Very surprised to see no Prajagale there. I remember asking SB to post the invite on Praja.

The first integrated township at Bidadi is IT focussed, and is being pushed because of its higher chances for success and therefore a model for the 5 other integrated townships that are planned around Bangalore. The one beyond Nelamangala is for manufacturing.

These townships are going to be fully integrated i.e. Live Work Play.

I am open to one or two Praja members joining the Infrastructure Committee this year. I am concerned about the loss of manufacturing in Karnataka.

Regarding entrepreneurship, as you may know, I won the Lockheed Martin Innovation 2008 Silver Medal. I was in Mumbai on 5th at the press do. FICCI the apex national body, Mr. V.K. Topa, publicly lamented, that it took the initiative of a US company to come to India and sponsor the competition and to take winning entrepreneurs to world markets, while no Indian company has even remotely even considered doing something similar let alone discussed it with FICCI.

As a nation, India and Indians are losing the edge. We are too risk averse. I guess 190 years of colonization, coupled with 60+ years of post-independence colonial education has made India a nation of great clerks.

It is a shame that phenomenal business leaders in the Indian IT industry are unable to develop products. We have to depend on a Sun for StarOffice or Microsoft, when there are hordes of IT engineers sitting on the bench, and OpenOffice is open-source and available and waiting to be tweaked. If we see the level of innovation in the bricks and mortar companies in India, it is simply phenomenal. Simple example the Nano, but there are so so so many more.

Pioneers and founders of smaller companies like Tally, Skorydov and others producing packaged software applications should get far more praise and recognition from us, the public. They are putting their hearts on their sleeve, faith in themselves, and risking it all to develop a product.

A friend of mine once described the larger Indian IT companies as still for all essential purposes practicing and generating "techno-coolies". I will partially dispute that, but I will stand and ponder if he is partly correct in his observations. 

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VVR, basically 190 years of colonial rule, followed by 60 years of Nehruvian "mommy-coddling" has sapped India of risk-appetite.

Be it the stock market or industry or personal life or governmental decisions, it is essentially herd mentality of trying to bet on a sure thing and avoiding hard decisions. You so rightly pointed out, this applies to careers also. Hence the migration to large companies who are growing larger, but not producing or incubating a proportionate share of innovation.

The new integrated townships being proposed should provide an opportunity for small enterprises to form.

Growth cannot be stagnated, ever. Once a city stops growing, it gets stunted and avoided. What Bangalore needs is a greater level of value creation. The IT services industry as it stands today, will not deliver it.

We need a Gujarat Modi approach which removes bureaucratic obstacles in the path of entrepreneurs and industry willing to invest money.

The focus on integrated transport options is one way to achieve the de-congestion of Bangalore.

-----------------------

Regards

Devesh R. Agarwal

Visit my aviation blog at http://aviation.deveshagarwal.com

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Why more IT parks in Bangalore alone, why not in other smaller cities in Karnataka. Congestion is removed, also it develops other areas of Karnataka,  and provides a window of opportunity to develop the infrastructure in those cities.

Agreed that Govt interest in IT is important, IT which somehow eventhough the poiticians did not envisage this trend has come to be India's trademark, and its important to retain atleast this position(we missed out on manufacturing in a big way). One other example wrt to IT is Ireland. But i think the Govt needs to start thinking about other fields as well. IT gives employment to only a few people, what about the underprevilleged?. A policy that focuses big on infrastructure(on the PPP model) would generate a lot more jobs than in the IT industry as well as work in tandem to support the IT industry.

Pls do correct me if i was wrong about something.

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