Traffic woes: Siemens not to expand in B'lore

Traffic woes: Siemens not to expand in B'lore

Rediff

Hit hard by infrastructure chaos in Bangalore, Siemens Ltd has decided to stop its expansion in the city, J Schubert, managing director, Siemens said on Friday.

"We have decided not to expand in Bangalore because the road traffic is in a mess. Everything ends in chaos," Schubert told PTI.

"No more expansion will happen here; We will expand in Pune, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai," he said.

Bangalore alone constitutes about one-third (about 4,600 employees, including 2,800 in IT and BPO operations here) of Siemens' total employee strength.

Apart from being the manufacturing base for the company's automotive sector and servicing workshop for industrial turbines, Bangalore is a hub for telecom, medical and automotive software development and high-end R & D.

Schubert said because of traffic chaos, people (Siemens' employees) spend more time on roads, resulting in "efficiency going down". The company has changed the reporting office timings from 0845 hrs to 0730 hrs, he said.

Schubert said hotel room tariff in Bangalore is high and overall costs are also "shooting up". Bangalore is no longer an attractive investment destination and "worst" in terms of infrastructure among cities in India at the moment.

Asked if the company has plans to move jobs from here to other Indian cities,he said: "That question will come up one day."

Siemens Ltd is the flagship of the Siemens Group in India, a leading provider of industry and infrastructure solutions with a business volume aggregating about Rs 5,400 crore (Rs 54 billion), employing over 12,000 people.

Corporate bigwigs like Infosys chief Narayan Murthy and Wipro head Azim Premji had also in the recent past criticised the Karnataka government for not doing enough to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure of the silicon valley of India.