| Cyberabad
Musings |
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If Silicon Valley were to be built in India, would it stop software professionals from wanting
to migrate to the US? The co-founders of Catalytic Software, Eric Engstrom, Christopher
Phillips, and Swain Porter, seem to have a strong reason to believe so.
INDIA - And why not? Wouldn't you, after a long day at work, love to unwind at an
ice-rink, stroll along the meandering sidewalks, shop for groceries leisurely, and then walk over to your plush hi-tech home, built under giant futuristic domes.
No, this is not an excerpt from one of Isaac Asimov's works. This is a preview of what Catalytic's co-founders (also ex-Microsoft techies) call an "information technology township," built in a bid to recruit legions of software developers, just in time before they disappear to the US. And sure enough, it is right here, in Cyberabad, err, Hyderabad.
Spread over 500 acres, the dream town is called New Oroville, and is a self-sustaining domed
residential and office community that is expected to house around 4,000 software developers and
their families, as well as 300 support personnel for sanitation, police, and fire in India.
The New Oroville project has the enthusiastic support of the Indian government, including Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who gave Catalytic the green signal.
On a local level, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, Chandrababu Naidu too is actively helping the New Oroville project cut through the red-tape. The openness of the Andhra Pradesh government to
technology investments in the area was part of what convinced Catalytic to set up shop in the state, and the company has gone out of its way to cooperate with all levels of the Indian government in order to provide the kind of stability investors would need.
Naidu is reported to have called New Oroville 'icon of progress' for Andhra Pradesh. And it could
well be just that. If it succeeds, this project is expected to create almost 4,000 IT jobs and
employment for people in supporting services as well as the possibility of a standard of living
equivalent to that of the US right here in India.
Puneet Bharghava, a software engineer working in the US agrees. "We are in the phase where the exodus from India to US is much more than immigration back to the country, but this is not going to last long. We may reach an equilibrium which might happen if we give software engineers the same working conditions available in US in India."
Will Indian programmers hold back their visas and turn down 'dream jobs' in the US? Only New
Oroville has the answer.
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