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Chennai: Coming Up From Behind Despite its vindictive political environment, Chennai's business is on a roll. It boasts of not one but three foreign automotive brands, the most successful retail industry, and now a software business that is Bangalore's envy. By Nitya Varadarajan
There are three things about Chennai that you have to hate: the water crunch, its sultry weather, and the obnoxious auto-rickshaw drivers. But if you are a businessman, non-partisan, and with a forgiving soul, this may just be the city for you. Consider: it has a busy port, an international airport, the highest teledensity, 355 technical institutions (including engineering colleges and polytechnics), around 200 ITIs, relatively low wages and high work culture (overall rank: 3), and low real estate prices. But most of all, it has a new Zeitgeist that rocks. Take a walk along the arterial Anna Salai, or the busy T Nagar bazaars, or better still some tony coffee pub near Sterling Garden, and you will see a city starry-eyed. Its binary dreams are, of course, the doing of the legions of software code jocks it has shipped out to the US of A. Their stories of American wealth, easy life, and comfort (big cars, big houses, and weekend 'vacations') have been told and retold until every kid in the middle-class family is absolutely convinced that there's only one job in the world worth doing: that of a software engineer in the US.
Those greenbacks, which in some quantities do trickle back in, have helped transform the city's soul. Iyer mamis of Mylapore, who not long ago spent their evenings in temples, can now be seen working the e-mail in a cyber café, and simultaneously comparing notes on California with the mami seated alongside. On other occasions, you might spot them at Spencer Plaza, Lifestyle or FoodWorld, shopping. (Chennai today is India's retail Mecca.) Perhaps, the single-biggest change that the whole software and dotcom phenomenon has wrought on Chennai is in terms of its mindset. Suddenly, middle-class families-long used to eking out a living in modest jobs-find that their children could actually try their hand at business and succeed. That in the era of knowledge industries, the brahmin could indeed become the entrepreneur. ''In the last five years there's been a tremendous spurt in entrepreneurship, particularly in information technology,'' says V.S. Sundararajan, Managing Director of TIL Studios Ltd, a 3-D animation company, who himself turned entrepreneur a year ago.
Although no hard figures were available from the Registrar of Companies in Chennai, one only has to look around for proof to Sundararajan's claim: bowling alleys, cyber cafes, and swank retail stores now dot the business landscape. Most of the new start-ups have predictably been in the area of software, where exports have soared from Rs 37 crore in 1995-96 to Rs 3,116 crore in 2000-01. Says Arun Jain, CEO of Polaris Software Lab, who was a Delhi resident for 30 years, but for the last 11 years has been in Chennai: ''This is a city of the right size, not as vast as Delhi. At the same time it is a knowledge city, the Brahmin culture is conducive for any knowledge, even in new domains. And then people attract more people, so the companies have come.'' Nothing better exemplifies the city's success in it than the grey, glass-and-concrete Tidel Park, which offers 1 million sq ft of office space to tech companies. Conceived in 1997, but unveiled only mid-2000, the building houses big names such as Satyam, eds India, and even Ford Information Technology Services India (FITSI). The automotive giant's 80,000-sq ft facility contains 800 work stations, and apart from developing systems for Ford's Asia-Pacific business, it will execute projects for other international markets. Ford estimates that this centre will generate businesses worth $30 million (Rs 141 crore). The bait for Tidel tenants? Two ISPs, dedicated 4,000 telephone lines, a dedicated 110 KV, video conferencing facilities, and centralised air-conditioning. A large part of the software success is due to the former chief minister M. Karunanidhi taking personal interest in developing an it policy for the state. The stretch along the Old Mahabalipuram has been made a 'cyber corridor', with the state-promoted Elcot planning to set up a 'cyber city' on 2,000 acres at Siruseeri. To lure investors, the state has proposed a number of incentives, including a subsidy of Rs 20 lakh and purchase tax waiver. In fact, the state is making a general push towards knowledge-based industries. Already, nearly half of the state's gross domestic product is accounted for by services (a significant part of that comes from in and around Chennai), and agriculture accounts for only 18 per cent, although it employs more than half of the workforce. Its biotech policy, for instance, envisages creation of a number of parks, including one for incubation (near Chennai), another for medicinal plants and yet another for marine biotechnology. There already is a ''Women's Biotechnology Park'' in Kelambakkam near Chennai. The idea being that biotech opportunities, so far limited to first-generation activity of fermentation of anti-biotics and tissue culture, should be opened up in other advanced areas such as DNA-based products and bioinformatics. Says P. Kaliraj, Director, Centre of Biotechnology, Anna University: ''Chennai has the infrastructure needed for drug targeting through bioinformatics.'' 1 2 |
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