The Hindu Business Line : Smart City sitting pretty?

LAST week's announcement by the State Government that it intends to pick up 9 per cent equity in the Smart City project being promoted by Dubai Internet City (DIC) in Kochi has been largely seen as a pointer to a future of accelerated growth and returns from the information technology (IT) sector.

The Chief Minister, Mr Oommen Chandy, told newspersons after the weekly Cabinet meeting that the project, which envisages an investment of Rs 1,500 crore in the first phase, was designed to generate 33,300 direct jobs over a period of 10 years.

The Government aims to hand over 62.27 hectares of the Government-owned Infopark at Kakkanad in Kochi, along with the buildings inside the area, to DIC for a consideration of Rs 109 crore. From this amount will come the equity component of the Government in the project.

The Government also plans to acquire another136 hectares of land, which it will sell to DIC for Rs 36 crore. Additionally, another100 hectares will be handed over to DIC free of charge, apparently in accordance with the Government's IT policy, which promises 30 cents of free land to companies for every 100 jobs generated.

And job creation seems to be the ultimate promise the Smart City project is dangling before supporters and critics alike - specifically, 33,300 jobs in 10 years. How this precise figure was arrived at, is unclear. But no one is overly bothered in the flush of the excitement of the possibility of a true IT Revolution in Kerala unfolding, centred around the State's commercial capital, Kochi.

There is good reason for such optimism since, around the world, parks have helped usher in mini-industrial revolutions, ever since Alfred Marshall, an economist at the University of Cambridge, US, and the father of research parks, first suggested the idea of synergistic industries clustering together to enjoy economies of scale. He imagined a scenario where academic research and business acumen merged to create new companies, jobs and wealth.

The first such park, still regarded the mother of all technology parks, is the Stanford Research Park at Stanford University, in northern California, built in 1951. It gave birth to some of the world's most famous tech companies - from Hewlett-Packard to Yahoo! to Cisco Systems, not to mention hundreds of small start-ups across the US.

The International Association of Science Parks (IASP) officially defines a park as "an organization managed by specialized professionals whose main aim is to increase the wealth of its community by promoting the culture of innovation and the competitiveness of its associated businesses and knowledge-based institutions."

A park, it says, should stimulate and manage "the flow of knowledge and technology among universities, R&D institutions, companies and markets." Moreover, it should use incubation and spin-off processes to facilitate the creation and growth of innovative companies. Finally, the IASP says, a park should provide value-added services, and high-quality space and facilities.

This will be the challenge before Kochi's Smart City. One key element in the success of parks is their ability to meet their client companies' needs by providing the right mix of services and facilities, co-operation and networking. One analyst says that good science parks do by design what occurred organically in California's Silicon Valley.

How Smart City designs its future will thus be crucial. Rather than be overly biased towards software and Internet firms, today's successful parks focus on companies working in such cutting-edge areas as biotechnology, nanotechnology (and materials science), wireless communications, environmental technology and high-end graphics, animation and computer gaming media.

Will Kochi's Smart City be able to replicate some of these successes? Going by the experience of Kerala's first IT park - Technopark in Thiruvananthapuram - this is not going to be easy, particularly achieving the lofty goal of employment generation. In almost a dozen years of existence,

Technopark has been able to generate only around 7,000 jobs, even as at least around 12,000 engineering and IT graduates are flung into the market each year by Kerala's fresh network of engineering colleges. Will Kochi reverse this dismal showing and outsmart the worrywarts and wet blankets?

The writer can be contacted at kgkumar@gmail.com

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