Roads, traffic only matters of concern in Bangalore: Maran

Roads, traffic only matters of concern in Bangalore: Maran
UNI

Poor roads and traffic congestion are the only matters of concern for Bangalore, the IT capital if India and the fourth best technology hub in the world, Union Communication and Information Technology Minister Dayanidhi Maran has said.

In a letter to Rajya Sabha member B K Hariprasad in connection with the Special Mention made by him in Parliament in August this year, the Minister said Bangalore had plenty of IT infrastructure in terms of power, telecom connectivity, water and state-of-the-art IT parks, but road connectivity was a concern.

He said there were 23 lakh vehicles in the city with about 750 new ones everyday adding to the pressure on the existing traffic.

Mr Maran said the state government and civic agencies were taking action to broaden and resurface roads wherever possible and long-term projects like construction of road overbridges, flyovers and grade separators were in the pipeline.

On the infrastructure front, projects like the Bangalore International Airport, Bangalore Metro, Hi-tech city, Hardware Technology Park, the elevated four-lane expressway connecting the Electronics City-Peripheral ring road, and the Cauvery fourth state second-phase work to increase water supply by over 500 million litres a day had been taken up and would be in operation in the next 2-3 years' time.

He said Bangalore city had seen phenomenal growth of IT companies during the last 7-8 years. There were 680 IT companies in 1998 and the number had increased to 1,584 now, of which 622 were MNCs contributing to almost 25 per cent of the GDP of the state. The total export from Karnataka for 2004-05 was worth Rs 27,600 crore accounting for one third of the total IT exports from the country.

The IT sector had provided direct employment to 300,000 and indirect employment to over 10,00,000 people. The pay bill of these companies was over Rs 10,000 crore and the city was the fastest growing in Asia with a population of 65 lakh and a floating population of 15 lakh.

The National Informatics Centre of the Ministry of Communications and IT had been providing e-governance suppport and NICNET backbone to central government departments, states, union territories and district administrations in the country for internet, e-mail, file transfer, data base development, e-governance applications development and hosting and access.

Some of the major applicaions implemented by the NIC included a dedicated RF Link (11Mbps) connection had been installed to provide internet gateway to 1,600 nodes of the Karnataka government secretariat, direct way 4,020 VSATs have been installed in all the 27 districts of Karnataka.

The Centre had also taken number of steps to promote IT in the country including providing incentives to industries, Mr Maran said.