Beyond Bangalore

Sramana Mitra looks beyond Bangalore. She writes:

India’s development needs to expand its scope. Not only does it need to go beyond IT & ITES and expand broadly into Manufacturing, it also needs to expand geographically out of the 3-5 major commercial hubs.

A simple math of each mega hub serving an average of 10 Million people, would indicate that with 10 of these, India can tackle 10% of the population.

Beyond that, we’re looking at the third tier cities, which, let’s say could service 5 Million people average, and if we can scale 20 of these, we have a solution for another 10%.

Atanu Dey’s RISC model says: “The total rural population of India can be covered by about 6,000 RISCs each servicing the needs of approximately 100,000 people. By providing a full complement of services, RISC creates a ‘micro-city’ which seeds the formation of a city by drawing to it the population from the surrounding areas.” An example of a RISC is Jamshedpur, Tata’s flagship steel town.

Once we have exhausted the third-tier cities, the next level of development would require looking into the RISC towns. But that’s still another 20 years away, unfortunately.