In the first survey of its kind—ever—Dataquest takes a look at India’s leading technology parks and sees how they fare against international standards. Here’s a surprise answer—the best ones do very well indeed
Technology Park can be a vague term. However, over time, internationally, the
concept has come to imply a few things that have been put together as a
definition—a Technology Park is a property-based development which has a
high-quality physical environment in a park-like setting; is located adjacent to
or at a reasonable distance from a research institute or university; and
emphasizes activities promoting growth of research, technology and knowledge
based enterprises. Briefly, a tech park is not a real estate shop. It’s a
business space provider that takes care of business needs, not just rents space.
The best of Indian tech parks actually live by this definition, with just one
key exception—Indian tech parks have been rarely associated with a university
or technology institutes.
The concept itself arose in the US in the 1950s, though there are schools of
thought that believe the timeline begins with the founding of Hewlett-Packard in
1939 by a bunch of Stanford University graduates in Palo Alto. In India, this is
a more recent phenomenon, coinciding with the boom in the IT services sector in
the early 1990s. Things have changed recently, though—with bandwidth no longer
an issue, other key factors are coming into play.
The International Association of Science Parks recently conducted a survey of
technology and science parks worldwide. It looked at pretty much the same
parameters we did. Here are some of its findings:
For instance, all tech parks internationally and in India struggle with one
constant dilemma—they are committed to providing not just a building, but a
community-like setting and ambience. Constraints of space and cost of land often
means that they end up being situated far from cities. And that’s the pay-off—large,
park-like settings that involve a lot of daily travel. Or a bunch of high-rise,
perhaps constricted buildings in the middle of the city. Every good tech park
tries to find the middle path. Here we take a look at how many of them in India
fare.
