Electronics cluster in Bangalore to help reboot IT

BANGALORE: The Karnataka government, which has been working towards incentivizing and encouraging companies and startups in the ESDM (Electronic System Design and Manufacturing) sector, is setting up India’s first brownfield cluster development project in Bangalore. 

Typically, brownfield projects refer to re-starting or renovating existing projects with additional investments. Announcing an update to its Karnataka i4 policy (introduced in October 2013), SR Patil, the state’s IT & BT minister has announced that the state has got in-principle approval for the project. 

“This will be set up at an estimated cost of INR 85.15 crore on 1.16 acres in Electronic City,” said Srivatsa Krishna, secretary, department of IT & BT. the IT/ITeS sector. 

Common facility for units

The sector, which provided jobs to 1.9 lakh people in 2001, is now providing employment to 10 lakh people today. To attract investments to the ESDM sector, which is expected to grow to $400 billion by 2020, the state will provide additional incentives to companies that register with the Karnataka wing. 

“We get benefits in addition to what the government of India has provided like INR 5 lakh for patent filing,” says Sanjay Nayak of Tejas Networks, whose company is among the eight which was registered on Friday as Karnataka ESDM companies. 

“The brownfield facility will help electronic manufacturing units in Bangalore to have a common unit for testing, instead of relying on neighboring states for such facilities,” says Sanjeev Keskar, chairman of the India Electronics and Semiconductor Association. 

The ministry has also announced a single-window clearance for IT/ITeS and related industries for investments up to Rs 100 crore and employment-linked incentives for land allotment to this sector. In a leg-up to startups, nine colleges in the state were provided an initial grant of Rs 5 lakh each to fund research on projects to solve local problems and find solutions to local needs as part of the ‘Karnataka New Age Incubation Network.’ Startups will be eligible for plug-and-play space with internet at a concessional rate of INR 5-15 per sq. ft. 

The government has also extended the exemption of Karnataka Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Rules, 1946 to include sectors like gaming, animation, telecom services and other knowledge-based industries. 

IT industry insiders fear that without the exemption, India’s IT companies would run the risk of getting unionized, as the standing orders, largely meant for establishments such as factories , typically list the working terms and conditions of labor. 

Bangalore bio

the 14th edition of Bangalore INDIA BIO (BIB), India’s biggest biotech show, is to be held from February 10 to 12 2014 at The Lalit Ashok, Bengaluru. The show will feature conferences, business meetings and an international exhibition that focuses on the theme “Biotech for a Better Tomorrow.” 

The event is organized by The Department of Information Technology, Biotechnology and Science & Technology, Government of Karnataka; Karnataka’s Vision Group on Biotechnology and MM Activ Sci-Tech Communications. 

The conference will feature lectures from distinguished personalities including Sir John Bertrand Gurdon, Nobel Laureate and Marc Van Montagu, World Food Prize Laureate. As it had in previous editions, the conference will host exhibitors from various verticals of life sciences industry, including bio pharmaceuticals, bio suppliers, bioinformatics and agri-biotechnology. 

Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, CEO of Bangalore-based bio-pharma company Biocon, said: “Bangalore is becoming a very impressive biotech hub, and I think that this is what we want to showcase to the world at large.”

Delhi, Bihar produce top IT engineers in India Study

The best talent pool of engineers is in Delhi, Bihar and Jharkhand, while those from Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are least employable, said a report. 

Employability for IT product roles in Delhi is as high 13% and as low as 15 in Chennai, says the National Employability Report of Engineering Graduates, 2014 by Aspiring Minds. 

Bangalore with 3.7% employability emerges as the best amongst Southern and Western cities in the IT product sector, it added. 

Tier III cities cannot be neglected from recruitment perspective as at least one out of every six engineering colleges is in a tier III city, the study said. 

Around 12% of engineers employable in IT services are in tier III cities, an absolute number of about 13,000. 

“Our National Employability Report in its latest edition goes deep in to the employability of engineering graduates, their capability, qualifications and aspirations,” Aspiring Minds CEO Himanshu Aggarwal said. 

Looking at state-wise distribution of employable talent, Aggarwal said while certain states produce huge number of engineers, the average employability in significantly low. 

“It is clear that that states need to be conscious towards better education quality rather than building more capacity,” he said. 

The mushrooming growth in terms of number of engineering colleges in the country has been alarming and has come out as the major reason for low employability of engineers. 

The report was based on the graduate class of 2013 and covers data of more than 1, 20,000 engineering students from more than 520 engineering colleges, across 18 Indian states.

Clients to decide salary hikes at Cognizant, Wipro, HCL Tech, Mindtree

For roughly 30,000 client-facing executives at India’s No.3 software services exporter Wipro, this year’s performance appraisal will be different.

The Bangalore-based company, whose customers include Citigroup and Cisco Systems, has embarked on a new experiment, in which its sales executives are ranked and graded based on customer feedback, with 70% of the performance rating coming from them. “If your customer says this guy is lousy and your boss says terrific, it’s not going to matter. Customer feedback is going to be a priority,” said TK Kurien, chief executive of Wipro told ET in an interview last month.

“That cultural change is what we are going through. And my sense is that when it finishes we will be in a far better position.” Kurien, who has been beefing up Wipro’s sales team, said the initiative is part of a ‘360-degree survey’ where everyone, including project managers, will be covered. Wipro is not the only one adopting this.

Cognizant, Mind tree rely on feedback

The need to better evaluate sales staff and improve their relationship with top customers is forcing other big players in the Indian technology services industry to place greater emphasis on client feedback while assessing staff performance.

Senior IT industry executives say linking customer feedback with key result areas drives positive behavior among executives to ensure enhanced customer satisfaction. “If an executive falls short of meeting or exceeding desired client satisfaction levels, it has a directly proportional impact on the annualized variable payout of the individual,” said Prithvi Shergill, chief HR officer at Noida-based HCL Technologies.

At New Jersey-based Cognizant Technology Solutions, which has most of its employees based in Chennai, quantitative and qualitative feedback from clients are part of each leader’s individual bonus plan.

The company organized a planning session for its clients and board of directors, where the board had a chance to hear feedback from customers, said James Lennox, its HR head. Vidya Santhanam, director, people function, at midsized firm Mindtree, said in future the company’s delivery platform will “enable clients to directly give feedback to each project member”.

Employees appraised using customer feedback are almost always sales and other client-facing executives who are responsible for raising client satisfaction levels. Since most of their interaction is with clients, companies say it is only fair if these executives are appraised by clients.

Besides evaluating employees better, it also helps companies do away with the age old annual performance appraisal process, where managers and their subordinates discuss goals and performance. But not everyone is excited.

Some industry experts say placing a higher weightage on customer feedback may fail to motivate employees. “The practice of using client feedback to appraise employees isn’t accurate because of the nature of products and services being delivered to these clients by IT companies,” said Ajit Isaac, MD and CEO at Ikya Human Capital Solutions.

“Essentially, services rendered by IT firms are an aggregation of firms, and no one employee, or group of employees can be appraised based merely on feedback.”

Elango R, HR head at Mphasis said the company has been using consumer feedback to appraise employees for the past couple of years, but it faced problems as “over-enthusiastic customers gave really extreme feedback”. “Relying entirely on this method gave a very one dimensional view of the employee. In cases of extreme feedback, we would now discuss it with the customer and employee individually to figure out why,” he said.