The Hindu : Business : West Bengal makes out a case for investments in IT

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Oct 03, 2004

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Business

West Bengal makes out a case for investments in IT

By Our Special Correspondent

CHENNAI, OCT. 2. The Left-ruled West Bengal may be a late-comer to the information technology (IT) industry but its sales pitch to attract investments in this employment-oriented sector seems to be no less competitive than that of other States.

According to an official team led by the West Bengal Minister for IT and Environment, C. Manibendra Mukherjee, and Secretary-IT, G. D. Gautama, the USP (unique selling proposition) offered by West Bengal is the location of three premier institutions, namely, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-Kharagpur), the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI-Kolkata) and Indian Institute of Management (IIM-Kolkata), whose graduates offer high-end skills needed for IT application in insurance, financial services, engineering design and mining.

As for the low-end skills much in demand in IT-enabled services (ITES) such as call centres and medical transcription, a reservoir of manpower was offered by the 11,500 higher secondary, secondary and madrasa schools chosen by the State government for imparting basic computer literacy with assistance from IBM, NIIT and Wipro, Mr. Mukherjee said at an interaction session with the media here recently.

The problem of attrition , faced by ITES companies everywhere, was the lowest in West Bengal, thanks to the "lack of a tendency (among Bengalis) to chase money", he said. It was in recognition of West Bengal's potential in IT that the "very choosy" Japan Bank for International Cooperation and the Japan External Trade Organisation had extended assistance to the State's mega projects to promote this sector, among others. The projects included an 800-acre facility at Rajarhat, the Salt Lake IT Park and a link to the city's metro (underground) train system from its IT hubs. DLF, the real estate major, was shifting its IT hub from Gurgaon to a mega 2.3 million sq. ft. enclave in Kolkata, the minister added.

Use of copper wire in place of the costly fibre optic cables, pioneered by IIT-Kharagpur, the recent launch of a School of Animation by the West Bengal Government in a joint venture with Toonz, telemedicine initiatives of the School of Tropical Medicine, Kolkata, and development of software in Braille and another for palsy-affected people were other testimonials that Dr. Gautama wielded to make out a case for IT investments in his State.

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