Know how Bhubaneswar is getting smart

There is a common perception that life could be better only in metro cities, but India’s tier-II cities are developing fast and offering opportunities for growth. One such example is Bhubaneswar, which is slowly becoming a hub for research and technology startups in the eastern region.

Let’s read about a person who moved from Kolkata to Bhubaneswar, looking for more opportunities to grow.
Young geneticist Birendranath Banerjee studies the effect of lifestyle stresses on one's genes at KIIT University in Bhubaneswar. He was not happy teaching in his hometown Kolkata when KIIT offered him a job with a promise of complete intellectual freedom. KIIT was then in the initial stages of setting up a business incubator, and Banerjee in the early stages of setting up a company. It was a perfect match.
The company, InDNA, was set up in 2012. In just three years, it is expanding to Kolkata, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and other cities. Banerjee got Rs 1 crore from the department of biotechnology, and Rs 2 crore subsequently from rich doctors in the region.
He is talking to large companies to provide testing services for their employees, and to figure out how much stress has influenced the functioning of their genes. "We are looking at the effect of lifestyle on the entire genome," says Banerjee.

InDNA is the most high-tech among the KIIT incubator companies. In the past four years, KIIT has invested Rs 15 crore in its building and Rs 10 crore in equipment, for which the DBT provided Rs 9 crore. It has incubated 34 companies, nine of which have moved out to their own offices and are in business. Bhubaneswar has other startups too, as the large IT companies have come to the city.
With several institutes of higher education, including an IIT, the city is slowly setting the foundation for becoming a hub for research and technology startups in the eastern region. Says Mrutyanjay Suar, director of biotechnology at KIIT: "Bhubaneswar is at the same stage where Bengaluru was in the early 1990s."
With its sketchy business history and laidback culture, Bhubaneswar at first seems an unlikely birthplace for 21st century startups. None of its educational institutions has set the country on fire through its research. The city is well laid out but retains its rural charm, being on the edge of a large forest and an elephant trail.
And yet there are signs of the city developing as a major eastern hub, as people of eastern origin started preferring the city to Kolkata. Consider IIT Bhubaneswar, one of the youngest among the country's elite institutions. It will eventually have a 1,000-acre campus, but it currently operates from a partially-abandoned government building, an environment that does not bother some of its young and distinguished faculty.
Let’s talk about another person who fulfilled his dream in the city.
Saroj Nayak returned from Rensselaer Polytechnic in the US a year ago to be a professor at IIT, despite several attempts by this famous institution to keep him back. Power cuts greeted him when he sat in his makeshift office, a situation he had never faced in his life.
His answer was to make solar back-up system, which he now sells through his startup Karma. This unit, replete with a solar panel, a battery, a fan, phone charger and a light, sells for around Rs 4,500. Nayak also had a fair bit of intelligence built into the system for energy management. "We are trying to reduce the environmental impact of energy generation with minimal investment,” he says.
The city is now sprouting luxurious new buildings, some of them built by large IT companies. Infosys was the first, as it built its first campus outside Bengaluru. TCS has one of its swankiest offices in the city. MindTree has built a learning centre in Bhubaneswar right next to TCS, and sends all its new recruits for intensive training there. Chip design firm Sankalp too has a development centre here.
Bhubaneswar has some native IT startups too. Software services firm ESSPL, started in the city in 1998, has offices around the world. AABSys, a geospatial and design software services company founded in 1996, is now a medium-sized company. But the current generation of startups, particularly from KIIT, are venturing beyond IT and solving problems of people in the region.


(Image: Indiatimes)