Leading IT city: ‘Pune good, but not good enough’

While Pune seems to score well on components like educational inputs, presence of major IT names in the city and opportunities for lifestyle growth, it falls woefully short of the most crucial sustainability determinant-infrastructure, said Natrajan.

NASSCOM and Kearney had undertaken a 50-city survey to determine what propels a city’s success in terms of the IT industry and what kind of ecosystem backs the city in its growth to this position. The cities were categorised into four segments: Leaders who were already well-established in the field, where Pune shared the limelight with Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Kolkata; Challengers that included cities like Baroda, Ahmedabad and Chandigarh; Followers that comprised Aurangabad, Nashik and Bhopal and finally Aspirants that listed towns like Allahabad, Patna, Ludhiana and Guwahati.

“While Pune was there amongst the top, it needs to do something very drastic to improve its infrastructure. The current employment is set to grow from two lakh to five lakh in the next decade and you have to plan for bigger things ahead,” said Natrajan. Else, he added, there are these 40 Aspirants and 12 Challengers who may well see the kind of IT growth Pune saw in the last six years and move in for a larger share of the pie.

This seems more pertinent in view of the report’s prediction that in the next decade the share of the sectoral employment in the top seven cities will decrease to around 60 to 75 per cent with the total direct employment in these cities growing to five to six million.

While the leaders would probably absorb the majority share, other locations will have the chance to capture two to three million direct IT-BPO jobs.

A micro-study on each of the 50 cities is now underway. As far as the leaders are concerned the questions being asked are: Is the growth sustainable and is there something that the government needs to do to make it so?

“Infrastructure has emerged as the biggest challenge for Pune. Another problem is that venture capital in the city is not well defined,” said Natrajan.