Presented By Neha Srivastava Pooja Srivastava Sneha Nigam Sunpreet Arora (Sec- B)

Referred to as the 'Silicon Valley of India,' Bangalore, the capital of the southern state of Karnataka, had a population of 5,686,844 In 2001, making it India's fifth largest city Around 1300 information technology (IT) companies operate in Bangalore and it is home to around 110,000 technology workers. This is in addition to the 60,000 people working in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firms.

In 2003, on an average, two research and development (R&D) centres of MNCs were opened every week in Bangalore. AMD, AOL, Cisco, Dell, Delphi Automotive Systems, Deutsche Bank, Eastman Kodak, E&Y, Google, HP, Intel, IBM Corp, Motorola Inc., Oracle, Lucent, Nortel Networks Ltd, SAP, Tektronix, Texas Instruments, and Yahoo have a presence in the city and some of the Indian IT majors like Infosys Technologies (Infosys), Mind Tree Consulting (Mind Tree), Wipro Technologies (Wipro) etc., are headquartered in Bangalore.

Fourteen of the top 20 IT exporters in India have a development centre in the city. During the year, software exports from Bangalore constituted around 36 per cent of the total exports from the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI). Of the $4 billion IT export revenues from Karnataka in 2003-04, 95 percent came from Bangalore.

Bangalore has been reported as the largest jobcreating city in India with more than 65,000 jobs likely to be created in 2004. However, the rapid growth of the city has resulted in infrastructural bottlenecks like traffic congestion, lack of hotel accommodation, lack of public service amenities etc. The Bangalore brand has also been facing stiff competition from upcoming cities like Hyderabad and Chennai, for being projected as the IT hub of India.

From a mere 13 software firms in 1991-92, the city now has a pool of over 1,200 software firms.
Working in areas such as computer chip design, systems software and communication software employing over 100,000 IT professionals. Bangalore has been fortunate to be rich in the supply of both economic and non-economic factors that make a place a preferred choice of business location. Bangalore has been considered an ideal place in terms of climate and infrastructure to conduct scientific research in sensitive areas like defense and electronics.

Presence of call centers and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies make it a diverse hub. Bangalores major edge is its Human Resource Bank. The State has begun to actively address and remove bottleneck in this area to sustain its competitive advantage.
Telecom industry helps in sustaining Bangalore's competitive advantage as the entire state is networked via Optic Fibre Cables and runs through private companies like Bharthi , Reliance etc.

Government has also played an important role in sustaining Bangalore's competitive advantage in the following ways : 1. IT industry was exempted from payment of purchase tax on computer hardware, computer peripherals & other capital goods for a period of 5years. 2. IT industry was given priority in the sanctioning & servicing of of power & was also exempted from

power cuts.

To Reduce the congestion inside Bangalore, government should construct new flyovers and railway over bridges and build international airport projects. Government should support the development of satellite townships and other cities in Karnataka. Set up a satellite earth station for high speed communication services to facilitate software exports Promotion of sectors other than IT such as hospitality, telecom, etc and lack of hotel accommodation is also a great problem . Develop more IT parks in neighboring cities like Mangalore and Mysore