Technology Park can be a vague term. However, over time, internationally, the concept has come to imply a few things that have been put together as a definition—a Technology Park is a property-based development which has a high-quality physical environment in a park-like setting; is located adjacent to or at a reasonable distance from a research institute or university; and emphasizes activities promoting growth of research, technology and knowledge based enterprises. Briefly, a tech park is not a real estate shop. It’s a business space provider that takes care of business needs, not just rents space.

The best of Indian tech parks actually live by this definition, with just one key exception—Indian tech parks have been rarely associated with a university or technology institutes.

The concept itself arose in the US in the 1950s, though there are schools of thought that believe the timeline begins with the founding of Hewlett-Packard in 1939 by a bunch of Stanford University graduates in Palo Alto. In India, this is a more recent phenomenon, coinciding with the boom in the IT services sector in the early 1990s. Things have changed recently, though—with bandwidth no longer an issue, other key factors are coming into play.

For instance, all tech parks internationally and in India struggle with one constant dilemma—they are committed to providing not just a building, but a community-like setting and ambience. Constraints of space and cost of land often means that they end up being situated far from cities. And that’s the pay-off—large, park-like settings that involve a lot of daily travel. Or a bunch of high-rise, perhaps constricted buildings in the middle of the city. Every good tech park tries to find the middle path. Here we take a look at how many of them in India fare.

Sarita Rani and Yograj Varma

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