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India has the goal of being the new China in terms of industrial and technological power. The two nations, at odds for too long, have been competing for years to get the biggest piece of the technology industry pie. Thus, India has launched policies to attract technology companieswith strategies for tempt giants like Samsung either Apple. The play it’s working Despite some inconveniences and accidents (such as the fire in one of the Apple plants), and the key is in the large business and technology parks.
One of them is Bangabandhu, a true business city that was launched almost 10 years ago with the aim of attracting leading companies and creating thousands of jobs and which, to a large extent, is today a deserted city.
Bangabandhu Hi-Tech City. Located in Kaliakir, in the Gazipur district of Bangladesh, the history of Bangabandhu Hi-Tech City goes back a long way. The park started to be ruminated in 1999 and it was in 2001 when feasibility studies began to be carried out. It took a few years until, in 2008, a perimeter wall was built and, after several works, the first functional buildings opened their doors in 2015.
The park account with an area of 1.5 square kilometers, being the largest high-tech city in the country and with more than 70 companies that have invested in the land, being Hyundai one of themmanufacturing the Hyundai Creta SUV 100% in India. The idea? Harbor 100,000 workers by 2025.
ghost town. The problem is that things, it seems, are not going as well as the Government and the Bangladesh Hi-Tech Parks Authority would like. The Rest of World media published a few months ago a reportage in which, beyond what is said, you can see photos of the state of many of the buildings in the complex at this time. But there are companies working, DataSoft being one of them.
Speaking to Rest of World, the company said they have only hired three full-time workers for the Bangabandhu headquarters. There were plans that never materialized and one of the main problems is the location. A company official comments that “they are in the middle of nowhere” and none of the engineers who are working in Dhaka want to move to Kaliakair.
The project
And the result, with Hyundai being the only one with a significant presence and many open fields, buildings under construction…
Communication problems. Precisely, it seems that location is one of the main problems of Bangabandhu. In June of this year, workers who must travel to and from the complex they pointed outthat trains do not pass through the place. That there is only one train with a regular schedule and that, obviously, its capacity is limited. This station connects directly to Dhaka and, after its inauguration in 2018, it seems to be deserted and, of the 38 trains that pass along the track, the only one that stops is the Sirajganj Express.
Russell T. Ahmed, president of the Bangladesh Information Services and Software Association, comments: “Big buildings are just the first step in creating a high-tech park, but to make it a success, you have to build an ecosystem. “It has to be a high-tech city.” Currently, it appears that only 5,000 people with assembly line and raw material input positions are the daily workers at the complex.
And bureaucracy. The solution is the forty-minute highway journey (without traffic) from Dhaka, but this lack of communication is not the only reason why Bangabandhu is a deserted city. In the Rest of World report, DataSoft and other companies point out that they abandoned their plans to move due to bureaucratic red tape.
Nefiz Ahmed is director of business administration at SydneySun, a surveillance company that set up an assembly plant in the tech city, and says that while the complex has seen a lot of development in recent years, they have also encountered more bureaucratic barriers. , such as obtaining permits and their processing. In addition, he emphasizes that his engineers do not want to spend three or four hours on the road.
Oh, the electricity. As if the location, transportation, the state of many buildings and the bureaucracy were not enough impediments, in March of this year the local media reported a blackout in one of the business centers that lasted 12 days. A fire damaged the substation that supplies power to the block and it took almost two weeks to resolve the problem.
It is something that affected several companies based in that block, such as Fair Technology Limited – a local automobile manufacturing company – and Golden Fiber – a fiber optic company. An anonymous Hyundai source claimed they had also suffered from power outages, commenting that “it is highly unlikely that high-tech industries will be without power for so many days.”
The talent. One of the main objectives of these high-tech parks is to attract local and foreign investments, but they are not achieving either one…or the other. Beyond the bureaucratic complications of licensing and incentives, international companies find that local workers they are not qualifiedfor positions that need to be filled or do not have the necessary experience in areas such as artificial intelligence, data analysis, cybersecurity or blockchain.
You have to give it a spin. The problem is that we might think that it is an isolated case, but it is not the only one. In 2017, the Sheikh Hasina Software Technology Park was inaugurated, which India’s Minister of New Technologies called “the Silicon Valley of Bangladesh.” Bigger words. Around 20,000 people were expected to work at the park, but currently there are only 1,600 daily workers.
Although campaigns were carried out to attract talent, they were a failure and, currently, only call center employees operate in that Indian Silicon Valley. We will see what result this has for a country that is trying by all means to attract the attention of large companies, but whose talents do not want to leave the cities. Perhaps the new technology park that is being built directly in Dhaka is the solution…
Images | park taeho, BHTPAGoogle Maps
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