Saturday, August 31, 2013: The Department of Information Technology seems to be highly ambitious regarding its plans meant for tier II cities in the state. The Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) group is of the opinion of developing Mangalore and other six cities as upcoming ICT centres in the state. The start-up warehouse programme entails setting up of more than 1,000 start ups in the state. Those six cities, which have to be developed as ICT centres include Mysore, Hubli-Dharwad, Gulbarga, Belgaum, Tumkur and Shimoga.
SR Patil, IT and BT Minister, stated that these cities would get special attention from states to help them become upcoming ICT centres. He said this at the inauguration conference on ‘Mangalore, the Emerging ITE Destination’ an initiative of the Department of IT. Incubation centres will be established in these seven cities, Patil added. In addition to it, funds would be granted for development of skills along with establishment of new talent development centres. Total 10,000 start ups are planned for the entire country, out of which 1,000 will be set up in the state.
ICT group on the lines of National Policy on Electronics has suggested setting up of Greenfield and Brownfield clusters by the state under the Electronic System Design & Manufacturing (ESDM) policy. Kris Gopalakrishnan, chairman, Vision Group on IT and co-founder and executive vice chairman of Infosys said that in order to decrease the gap in the current account Deficit, the situation requires setting up of electronics manufacturing facilities in the country. Therefore, he laid emphasis on tapping tier II cities for this purpose as these cities enjoy an edge over Bangalore with regard to life style, cost of operation and attrition rates.
