The Hindu Business Line : Karnataka plans two more software parks

THE Karnataka Government has sent a proposal to the Centre for establishing two more STPIs (Software Technology Parks of India) in the State. While giving this information, the Additional Director of STPI Bangalore, Mr J. Parthasarathy, was not willing to identify the names of the towns where the proposed parks were to come up.

He said the State Government had forwarded a request to the Centre (for starting two more IT parks) and was confident of the Centre clearing the proposal.

Besides Bangalore, Mysore, Manipal, Mangalore and Hubli were other emerging towns that witnessed robust growth, he said, and added that the State's IT exports stood at $4.02 billion (Rs 18,100 crore) last year.

The STPI Additional Director was confident of achieving a 30 per cent growth this fiscal over last year's performance.

At present, more than 60 per cent of the country's IT exports were to destinations in the US and Canada. Europe however, was fast catching up. "The Japanese and Australian markets offers tremendous potential," he said.

He noted that in recent months Japanese delegations visited Bangalore more often. "Language is the only barrier," he added.

Mr Parthasarathy told this correspondent that there was a rush for setting up development centre in STPI. "We receive enquiries from at least two foreign companies every week. They are keen to set up a development centre and many companies are looking at Bangalore. But major companies have started to look at tier-II cities as potential hubs for disaster recovery arrangement."

It is learnt that 15 major companies had recently conducted a market survey of secondary towns (including Coimbatore) for setting up a development centre in such places because of the rising cost and high attrition rate in metros.

According to Mr Parthasarathy, the attrition rate in the ITES and BPO space in Bangalore was as high as 35 per cent. He added that an integration of sorts was taking place in cities like Bangalore with the units re-orienting themselves for better delivery.

STPI, he said, had cleared proposals from 168 companies last year for setting up their units in its park. Of these, 110 proposals were from foreign companies and 48 applications were from the BPO segment.

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