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This happened a few years back during the Nasscom opening ceremony in Mumbai. The Maharashtra CM was waxing eloquent on how Mumbai has emerged as a top IT hub in the country and how other cities in Maharashtra too are ahead of their counterparts in terms of IT adoption. Subsequently, there was a mild rebuke by the then Union Minister for IT, Pramod Mahajan, who said that states should concentrate not on outgunning each other in IT adoption, but in helping build a resurgent IT country.

For a national level politician, Mahajan might have little option to say otherwise, but almost everyone would agree that it is Utopian to think of different states not competing against each other in winning IT laurels. This explains the rationale behind conducting the recent DQ-IDC survey on Top IT cities in the country, conducted across 35 cities spanning 16 states. Barring a few pleasant surprises the results arrived at were on expected lines.

Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi/NCR bagged the top five positions in the overall ranking. One need not be an Einstein to guess so, since these cities have been on the vanguard of IT revolution in the country from the beginning and are today thriving hubs of IT and BPO activities. In our survey, Delhi included partially the NCR region-Gurgaon and Noida were considered as part of Delhi only as these are today's IT hotspots.

While the Top Five were on expected lines, it was the Next Six in the overall ranking that did throw up a surprise. While Pune, Kolkata and Kochi were expected to be in the list, having emerged as new IT hubs in the last two years and as challengers to the leaders, the surprise inclusions were Nagpur and Lucknow. Not really tom-tommed as great centers of IT activities, these cities perhaps owed their positions to their thriving reseller communities. Moreover, while these cities have the potential, they are yet to take off in a big way given that they have competition from other cities within their own states. For example, Pune edges out Nagpur in terms of mindshare amongst top IT decision makers, Noida is always preferred to Lucknow. Also, as respective state governments sell their states, they too would talk about second line cities like Pune rather than sell other destinations, irrespective of the potential of the city.

Just as Nagpur and Lucknow, along with cities like Coimbatore, Ludhiana and Jamshedpur, had a pleasantly strong showing, some cities scored fairly lower than expected. Notwithstanding the advertising and marketing blitz by the Gujarat government, Ahmedabad came up at a poor #24rank. A shockingly low ranking of #31 on the manpower front and #15 on ICT infrastructure pulled the city down-it would need immediate remedial measures to pull up its position next year. In fact, Ahmedabad was not even the number one IT city in Gujarat; that position went to Vadodara. Jaipur and Indore too finished lower than expected at #19 and #21 respectively-with GE endorsing Jaipur and CSC Indore, these results were indeed surprising.

The overall rankings of different cities also show the IT health of certain states across the country. Maharashtra comes forth in a very favorable light. Three cities in the state-Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur-featured in the Top Ten in overall ranking, while Nashik came a creditable #16. UP featured the maximum in the survey with six cities, but had mixed results-while Lucknow finished in the Top Ten, Allahabad and Agra languished in the #15 and #17 positions respectively; Varanasi and Kanpur turned out to be real laggards at #29 and #30 respectively.

Dataquest does not claim the DQ-IDC survey to be the ultimate last word, but it is definitely creditable as a first attempt. The survey could not be conducted at some obvious cities like Chandigarh, Bhubaneshwar or Raipur, but that does not reduce its importance and veracity. More importantly, we would definitely contrive to include these cities in our survey next year. Also conspicuous by their absence this time were the North-Eastern cities like Guwahati, Shillong and Gangtok, where automation is gradually spreading its tentacles. The DQ-IDC survey definitely contemplates including them next time.

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