Pune is buzzing with activity. The state government is laying six tracks of fiber optic cable along the expressway. Every inch of space in the 400-acre IT park set up by MIDC and STPI has been sold out, with another 400-acre park under development. Consider the financials: all told, IT investments in Pune totalled over Rs 100 crore in 2000-01 alone. Trained manpower, you said? Well, the city’s engineering colleges and IT institutes spew out 3,000 IT professionals every year. Industry acceptance? Nasscom itself promoted IT in Pune in June last year—the first time the software association pushed any city. Fot those still apprehensive about corporate acceptance, here’s the clincher—Wipro, as part of its expansion drive, has chosen Pune as the first base for its global R&D center.

Competition for Bangalore’s status as India’s IT hub? Perhaps not, but Pune is quietly transforming itself from being just an educational and engineering base—which, by the way, has earned it sobriquets like ‘The Oxford of the East’ and ‘India’s Detroit’—to a hi-tech city without parallel. As the Pune government puts it, "We might still lose out in this race to figure on the global IT map if we stay quiet. With so much being written about technopolises and cyberabads, why should Pune, a city with equal if not better charm, lag behind?" Why indeed?

There is a similarity between the head that wears the crown, Bangalore, and the other that aspires to wear it, Pune. The latter has the image of being a laid-back town, fit for holiday-makers and students, and a pensioners’ paradise—something Bangalore too was called till IT arrived to transform the landscape. Pune is now fighting hard to shrug off its rustic countenance, in its bid to covet global IT majors. It is already number five on the Indian IT ladder, following Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Delhi. Interestingly, all the others are state capitals.

But Pune lays a qualitative claim to fame. As Anand Deshpande, MD, Persistent Systems says, "In Pune, the quality of software developed is far better than all other centers, including Bangalore and Hyderabad. You will find esoterically good quality in Pune. Companies in other cities like Hyderabad and Bangalore have predominantly low-end to medium-scale work. Pune does top-of-the-line development." This stand is vindicated somewhat by the fact that most IT companies in Pune are largely into technologies like embedded systems, communications, VLSI, systems software, applications software, chip design and network products—the higher end of the value chain.

An overview of the investments in the city: Wipro’s development center, housed in the 600-head-capacity 100,000-sq meter campus at Hinjewadi Park, will focus on providing design and development services for global communication and embedded systems. The center has already garnered development projects from global majors. Then there’s Finolex Group’s International Institute of Information Technology at IT Park, with an investment of Rs 20 crore. The institute, which will offer intensive PG diploma courses in software development and telecom, will provide residential facilities to 300 students. Small research labs will be set up on the campus in association with companies like Microsoft, Intel, Sun, SAP and Lucent Technologies. The institute will also focus on software development for the SAARC countries. Finolex also plans to lay fiber optic lines in parts of Maharashtra at an investment of Rs 600 crore, with the highway-parallel line being laid under its aegis.

Then we have the Internet-over-cable service launched by Silicon Mountains and Global Electronic Commerce Services, touted to be the first-of-its-kind in the country. Silicon Mountains has installed a 100-km hybrid fiber cable backbone spread across the city. Global has a gateway in Pune for this project and its satellite gateway—with bandwidth of 20 Mbps—is already operational. The fiber cable has bandwidth of up to 200 Mbps (traditional copper lines offer only 2 Mbps)…indications enough that Pune is going all out to bolster quality infotech development, a fact also recognized by MNCs Versaware, PTC, IBM and Veritas, and Indian giants Satyam, Infosys and Wipro, all of whom have set up huge development centers here.

IT minister Pramod Mahajan’s efforts at taking infotech to the masses also finds a common voice among agencies like CDAC, which is known for its pioneering work in multilingual software, and Pune Vyaspeeth, an NGO promoted by parliamentarian Suresh Kalmadi. It suffices to say that Pune may be behind in terms of numbers—of large MNCs, IT revenues, investments—but it has the potential to figure in the top league. Deshpande says, "Pune is not lagging in terms of innovation."