After the clipping West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya got on the Infocom 2002 event dais in December, for his talk about being "slow and steady" in joining the IT and ITeS bandwagon, it’s time to put Kolkata’s e-readiness under the scanner.

Yes, the state lost the IT race to its Southern rivals in the 1990s. But Kolkata is now more serious about finding out why—and filling the gaps—than it has been in the past ten years. Most agree that the state government has done precious little in this sector so far, but some say all its unhurriedness and caution over the past couple of years may actually help the state today. ‘It was worthwhile to wait and watch after IT firms worldwide bit the dust in the wake of the IT meltdown and the dotcom bust. Now is the time to take the right decisions,’ says an industry person.

So even if you dismiss West Bengal’s IT revenues in 1996 as negligible, the 114 per cent annual growth (CAGR) from that year onward, for five years until 2001, is good. A Nasscom survey on the competitiveness of nine cities as a destination for IT-enabled services has ranked Kolkata fourth. The state government claims it has the best package of incentives among Indian states, with up to Rs 1.5 crore as capital investment subsidy and an interest subsidy of up to Rs 1 crore for five years. According to the buzz in the corridors of Writers’ Buildings, the first file signed by ‘Buddha babu’ after taking over as chief minister in November 2000 was land allotment to Wipro for its Rs 50 crore project. And in the next week, he cleared the Saha Institute’s Medical Cyclotron project.

Three years ago, the state government had appointed McKinsey & Co as consultants, to prepare a development roadmap for the state with IT as a big growth driver. Now, the government is trying to follow the McKinsey prescription. The government-McKinsey team, during the course of the investment promotion initiatives in the recent past, had meetings with 36 investors across five cities. Of these, 13 proposals are reported to be in ‘serious dialogue’ stage with GE, ICICI, ITC Infotech, Unilever, TCS, Cognizant, Reliance Infocom and Daksh software, among others.

One key need is to have ‘anchor firms’ setting up in the state. This ‘action point’ is under way, with some prospects having firmed up their investment plans. Some, such as TCS, Cognizant and PwC, have already been in the state for long. Other relationships and projects are under way:

n A tie-up with Microsoft for the state’s WAN connecting the government secretariat and district headquarters, as a base for e-gov.
n A broad-based relationship with IBM. Apart from IBM’s plans with PwC (which it now owns), it will participate in computer education in primary and higher schools, and in e-governance initiatives. IBM will also offer advice for the growth and development of the state-run Indian Institute of Information Technology, including designing software for the IIIT syllabus, and set up of Centers of Excellence at IIIT and Jadavpur University. Other partners for education include NIIT, and Wipro.
n GE’s fifth BPO location in India is very likely to be West Bengal, though plans and dates are not firmed up.
n Wipro is setting up a software center on 12 acres of land in the Salt Lake Electronic Complex with an initial investment of Rs 50 crore and a capacity to employ 2,000 people. This is under way.
n Spectramind, now part of the Wipro group, in "actively evaluating" West Bengal as a BPO location. Its founder, Raman Roy, is the man who set up GE’s call center operations in India.
n The Reliance Group plans a ‘Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of ICT’ in Kolkata. Talks are also on for setting up a 500-seat call center, a telecom engineering center with R&D facilities, and a 100-acre ‘Knowledge City’.

West Bengal’s IT Secretary D P Patra says that investors are now getting excited about opportunities in Kolkata. "Look at the investment plans of Wipro, Spectramind and Microsoft," he says. "We’re seeing a second spate of investments now, after 1995. And all of them are IT-related. These concrete proposals speak for themselves."

McKinsey has advised the state government to deal with these early investors with kid-gloves, as they will be the primary large investors in the state—and much will depend on their experiences in the state to attract further investors, and an environment for IT growth.

McKinsey has listed a range of problems: poor image, inadequate infrastructure, especially communication, lack of qualified graduates and engineering colleges, poor marketing, and low initiative and motivation of local entrepreneurs. It has suggested action points, and the government has, for a start, allowed private participation for creating more engineering colleges.

McKinsey has pointed out that to meet the state government’s 2010 targets (a 15 % of India’s software exports pie, 25 % of all product development/research and outsourcing, and 5-10 % of domestic software services) infrastructure needs to be quickly ramped up for manpower training and development. The state will have to produce 30,000 engineering graduates from 2005, a more than tenfold increase from today! For ITeS, some 230,000 graduates are required around year 2006, of which 65,000 must be from the commerce stream. The state government has also introduced basic computer education in 100 higher secondary schools, with the help of NIIT and Webel. The next batch of an equal number has been taken up by Wipro and Webel. A third batch is slated to be taken up by IBM and Webel.

Meanwhile the state government is scouting for tie-ups with the Birla Institute, IMT (Ghaziabad), the Apeejay Institute of Technology in Delhi, Reliance (for a Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of ICT) IIM Kolkata for churning out trained manpower to drive the future IT dream machine. For this, it has earmarked 200 acres of land at Rajarhat. The ICT infrastructure is coming up. Reliance is laying an optical fibre network. And to tap Bharti’s Chennai-Singapore undersea link, a Kolkata-Vishakapatnam link is coming up.

The state government’s goal and vision: to rank among the top three IT states in India by 2010. That’s not easy. The others won’t be sitting still. Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Gurgaon, Hyderabad—they’re bigger, and they’re moving forward too.

Kolkata’s "slow and steady" approach is not going to easily win this race. It will be an uphill road in 2003, but the first steps have been taken.

Shehla Raza Hasan