Perusing Bangalore, 'The Silicon Valley of India'

Perusing Bangalore, 'The Silicon Valley of India'
BY ANNE KRISHNAN : The Herald-Sun, Durham, North Carolina

BANGALORE, India -- With tree-lined streets, high-tech business parks and wall-to-wall traffic on the highways at rush hour, the Indian city that's become almost synonymous with offshoring isn't so different from the Triangle in some ways.

Like the Triangle, Bangalore has welcomed an influx of workers drawn long distances by the high-tech industry and the opportunities it provides.

Electronics City, the city's first and most prominent high-tech park, sits about 11 miles outside Bangalore on the road to Hosur. Boasting more than 100 tenant companies, including Hewlett-Packard and Motorola, the 332-acre park was established in 1978 by the Karnataka State Electronics Development Corp.

Indian biotechnology giants such as Biocon sit just outside the park on Hosur Road, as does a chrome and glass BMW dealership.

Entering Bangalore, the large office and apartment buildings give way to small storefronts selling eggs, silk and bamboo ladders and huge new Western-style malls such as The Forum, which offers Pizza Hut, KFC, adidas and a movie theater. The hot shopping strip on Brigade Road offers brands such as Levi's, Benetton and Tommy Hilfiger.

High-tech companies are spread throughout Bangalore in other business parks and standalone buildings, as well.

"Bangalore today is the Silicon Valley of India or Asia," said S. Devarajan, managing director of Cisco Systems India. The city's 1,200 IT companies create an environment in which more and more employees are being nurtured and trained, he said.

A new generation

Sajna Ibrahim, 26, has worked at Wipro Technologies, one of India's leading outsourcers, for more than four years. Married with a 2-year-old son, she recently led a project to develop large-screen HDTVs.

"We get to work with the best technologies in the world, and since we're working on different projects year by year, our knowledge keeps evolving year by year," she said.

Ibrahim's parents, both professors, are supportive of her career aspirations and help her with childcare while she's at work. At home, she and her husband both take care of their son, Amaan.

"The mindset is changing in the younger generation group," says Ibrahim, who like many female workers wears the traditional long tunic and pants called a salwar kameez. "If women don't have support at home, they find it's too hard to maintain the work-life balance."

About 20 percent of Wipro's employees overall are women, said spokesman Supratim Sarkar.

"This is an equal opportunities kind of place," he said. "The only thing we look for is your skill set. It doesn't matter your caste, creed, religion, etc."

Unlike in the United States, many of the residents of India's different states speak different languages. So Wipro, Cisco, Dell India and dozens of other multinational and Indian corporations have adopted English as the language of business for their employees.

All of Wipro's employees take part in an accent neutralization program. Not all employees have to develop American accents, but they do need to make sure they're understandable to American clients, Sarkar said.

And far from being a sweatshop, Wipro brings amenities to its employees, he said, offering banking, an American-brand clothing store, gyms and swimming pools. About 150 company buses shuttle employees between home and work each day.

Competitor Infosys' manicured 70-acre campus offers similar amenities, plus bicycles on loan, a putting green and a cricket ground. Its food courts offer Indian, Chinese and Mexican cuisines, as well as hamburgers and Domino's Pizza.

Bulls and blackouts

But for all the similarities, Bangalore is obviously not in North Carolina.

As in other parts of India, it's not uncommon to find cows -- sacred animals to Hindus -- lounging in the medians or on the sidewalk chewing their cud, unfazed by the choking diesel fumes.

And where sport utility vehicles clog the Triangle's roadways, many of Bangalore's high-tech workers either take company shuttles to and from work or scoot around town on motorbikes. The ubiquitous autorickshaws -- three-wheeled buggies powered by motorbike engines -- are available for hire as taxis, as well.

Blackouts are frequent in Bangalore, so companies like Wipro have backup generators that can power their whole campus for up to four full days.

"We had to build these kinds of redundancies for our clients' sakes," Sarkar said.

Meanwhile, Bangalore's temperate climate is more like Silicon Valley's than Durham's, with high temperatures in the low- to mid-80s for nine months of the year.

Locals say the climate is one of the factors that attracts companies and workers to Bangalore, as opposed to Delhi, where temperatures hit 90 or above between April and October.

"The climate is a major reason why all these companies stick around here," Ibrahim said.

The city's labor force isn't bad, either. There are 13 engineering colleges in Bangalore alone, Devarajan said.

With that kind of educational network, "why not be a superpower in the software industry?" he said.