Naidu has a dream

The leader of the Telugu Desam Party and its government has not left any doubt about his earnestness about ensuring the success of the pioneering plan for a Hyderabad Information Technology and Engineering Consultancy City. The Hitec City has already been unfolding before the admiringeyes of the IT-savvy at home and abroad. The package of incentives and infrastructure provided and promised to investors, ensuring the participation of giants in the field including Microsoft, Metanor and VSNL, has inspired talk of Hyderabad replacing Bangalore as the computer capital of India.

The project and its progress certainly deserve praise, as does its prime author and promoter, but without exaggerated expectations. Computer kiosks of Hyderabad may soon become almost as known as its celebrated cuisine, and the city a perennial source of skilled manpower for international players with special efforts like the establishment of an Indian Institute of Information Technology.

However, it needs to be reiterated that a Silicon Valley has to be built not in a day, but byte by byte over the politically and otherwise uncertain times ahead. It is good that the project has survived the sanctions scare, but it will be grave folly not to recognise the state’s and even the nation’s responsibility to ensure thatinvestments in it are not endangered.

Naidu, by all accounts, commands the trust and confidence of the captains of the IT sector, his credibility with them carried several notches higher than the average neta by his strikingly un-politician-like presentation of his pet project before the European Union envoys. But computer-friendliness is not the only quality called for in a Chief Minister taking on a challenge of this kind.

True, the Opposition in the state has not tried too hard to be fair to him. After its abortive attempt to raise allegations of large-scale corruption in relation to the joint-sector project, it has launched a campaign to lampoon the Chief Minister as the Chief Executive Officer of Andhra Pradesh Inc. Populist propaganda of this sort, which seeks to portray the Hitec City as a utopia unrelated to the people’s problems, cannot be met merely by digitising the state machinery. Naidu will only be giving a bad name to the project and its philosophy, if it is seen to be receivingdisproportionate official attention at the cost of subjects like Naxal-harassed Telengana or the state’s cotton farmers. There are pitfalls on the information highway ahead of Andhra Pradesh that have to be politically negotiated and avoided.