Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala was the early bird in India’s information technology revolution, setting up the country’s first IT park in the early 1990s in the state capital.
However, the criticism since then has been that the rest of the country changed gears and overtook the state, while Kerala remained a marginal player. While metro cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai and even tier-two cities such as Bhubaneswar and Pune hit it big in IT, Thiruvananthapuram and Kochi have mostly been playing catch up.
That situation may be poised to change, with the state likely to see a growth in tech companies across the three IT hubs that it has, namely the Technopark in Thiruvananthapuram, the Infopark in Kochi and the Cyberpark in Kozhikode, all established by the state government.
According to Infopark CEO, Hrishikesh Nair, the three parks together are likely to account for as many as 500,000 IT sector employees by 2020.
One of the reasons for the robust growth is the emergence of Kochi as a major IT hub, where the Infopark boasts of 25,000 staff across more than 120 companies. The park has now established two smaller ‘spokes’, at Cherthala and Koratty. Among the companies at Infopark is Dubai-based Almotahida Education Systems.
Nair feels that the growth in Kochi is set to gather steam in the near future because of the realisation of the Kochi Metro, as well as the federal government choosing the city as one of the 20 ‘Smart Cities’ across the country. He sees the Infopark alone having 75,000 employees over the next three years.
