Here’s how serious Bhubaneswar is about catching up with Bangalore

The temples of Bhubaneswar, India. Photo credit: Andrew Moore.

“My wife is overjoyed we’ve moved to Bhubaneswar from Bangalore. It takes minutes to get home from the airport, instead of hours,” quips Subroto Bagchi, co-founder and former chairman of Mindtree, one of the leading IT services companies of Bangalore.

The quip is made only half in jest. Bangalore’s transport infrastructure has failed miserably to keep up with its growth. This has a serious impact on productivity and work-life balance.

Bangalore has one of the lowest road densities for any large city – less than half of Delhi’s, points out Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys, in a blog post. “The mobility of vehicles has slid from 40 kmph to 20 kmph, affecting the productive hours,” pointed out Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro, another one of Bangalore’s marquee IT companies, in a recent meeting with the state government.

We’re building a model smart city for the country and a great place to do business

And it’s not just transport that handicaps India’s Silicon Valley. Piles of garbage have led to annual outbreaks of dengue and power outages have forced businesses to install polluting diesel-burning electricity generators.

The state government keeps making promises to Bangalore’s tech community, but has done too little so far to visibly improve conditions in the city that contributes nearly half of the state’s GDP.

This is the context in which emerging tech hubs around the country are pitching to attract startups, entrepreneurs, and investments to their cities. The latest is Bhubaneswar, the capital city of India’s eastern state of Odisha. And in many ways, Bhubaneswar’s ambition to become one of India’s top three tech hubs, alongside Bangalore and Delhi, deserves to be taken the most seriously.

Better governance

Three days ago, Odisha’s chief minister Naveen Patnaik announced a new policy with a slew of incentives for startups to be located in Bhubaneswar. Interestingly, the chief minister, flanked by his top bureaucrats, launched the Odisha startup policy in a Bangalore hotel – and not in Bhubaneswar.

Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik. Photo credit: TeachAIDS.

“We’re building a model smart city for the country and a great place to do business,” he declared in polished English to a large hall jam-packed with entrepreneurs, investors, and business honchos who had turned up to see if the ‘O’ in Odisha really represents ‘opportunity.’

These days, every other state government in India is coming out with a startup policy to attract entrepreneurs and investments. What makes the Odisha pitch different is that it is backed up with solid work on the ground.

A sprawling InfoValley is coming up fast in Bhubaneswar, a short distance from the airport. It’s an integrated “walk-to-work” township with both residential and commercial complexes, planned by Jurong Consultants of Singapore. The InfoValley includes a 216-acre electronics manufacturing cluster, already approved by the central government which has been giving a push to ‘Make-in-India.’

Odia programmers

Temple town to smart city