Jury still out on renaming B'luru as 'TecHalli'

FROM Bangalore to Bengaluru to the Silicon Valley of India, the IT capital has now been rechristened as 'TecHalli' by one of the top industrialists of India and Chairman of Mahindra Group, Anand Mahindra.

'TecHalli' is a nice mixture of two worlds- both old and new. While 'tec' obviously has been derived from the term 'technology' which the southern city is an embodiment of, 'Halli' stands for village in Kannada. In a competition held by Mahindra on twitter, the winning entry was submitted by @SrinivasPReddy. The competition was co-judged by co-founder and chairman of Infosys Nandan Nilekani.

Meanwhile, this renaming exercise has evoked mixed response from netizens and Bangaloreans. Congratulating the winner, one user (@abhiyogi) tweeted, "Good and congratulations to the winner. But Silicon Valley is a metaphor and when u say TecHalli of India internationally, no one will understand what it means unless they know Kannada."

Mahindra, however, had a quick reply to such apprehensions. "Well, it's time they made an attempt to understand what it means. Much of the world doesn't speak English and didn't initially understand what Silicon Valley meant either", he replied.

Talking to Bizz Buzz, many professionals and IT officials are also equally divided on the renaming exercise.

"It's a good name. Halli stands for village and if you just go out 20 kms away from Bengaluru, the features of Halli is still intact across the State. Also, the city is the hub of technology innovations with hundreds of software services companies and startups. Therefore, the new name suits the city," said Anjan Jayasimha, a communication professional working in a MNC firm in the city.

Jayasimha, who has been born and brought up in the city, however, said that such renaming solves no purpose if the city doesn't drive cutting-edge innovations for the country and the world. "The city has so many problems. The living standard should be comparable with the Silicon Valley of the US," he added. Bengaluru is home to hundreds of IT services companies including the second and fourth largest software services firms- Infosys and Wipro- of the country.

Apart from IT services firms, the city has also emerged as the favourite spot for maintaining backend technology works of most Fortune 500 companies. It has more than 45 per cent of total 1,300 GICs (global inhouse centres) that are operating in India.

Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Texas Instruments, Volvo, Alstom, Cisco, Morgan Stanley, Adobe, Honeywell, Walmart, Intel and many more have their research and development centres in the city.

Apart from such technology centres, Bengaluru is also spearheading the startup ecosystem in the country. The city is home to more than 1,700 registered startups. The likes of Flipkart, InMobi, Zerodha, RazorPay, BigBasket, Zoomcar, Practo and many more have grown in the city. The southern city is also home to most unicorns in India.

"TecHalli is a good name but what is in a name. It is a wasteful exercise. Can the international community recognise the city when we say TecHalli like they do for Silicon Valley. Therefore, the moniker of Silicon Valley of India sounds more appropriate," said IT sector veteran who didn't wish to be named for the story.

Silicon Valley is a region in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northen California and is home to many technology-led firms of the world. Apple, Alphabet (parent company of Google) Tesla, Salesforce, Twitter, ebay, Netflix, and many more such marquee firms have their headquarters in the city.