Infosys recently announced a transfer policy offering an incentive package to its employees. As part of the package, the IT firm will provide incentives to those employees, who are open to take a transfer to its Hubballi development centre. Reportedly, this move is aimed at strengthening its operations in this tier-2 city in the Mumbai-Karnataka region. Although, it seems a small announcement, it, nonetheless, holds a lot of significance for the Indian IT industry. This comes even as many state governments are trying to increase the IT industry’s reach in tier-II and tier-III cities. Even the central government has come up with various policy measures to promote IT/ITes industry’s growth in the hinterland on the STPI platform. Despite these initiatives, the contribution of these areas to the $245 billion IT industry remains low. And there are various reasons for this phenomenon. But the foremost reason is availability of talent. As job opportunities and the corresponding prospects are high in Bengaluru, Pune, Noida, Hyderabad, Chennai and Mumbai, among others, engineers eye those very centres for career growth.

Understandably here, the complexity of the projects executed is high and provides a greater chance of learning. Secondly, employees working in metro centres usually get noticed by senior executives. This helps them get promotions, onsite projects and higher salary incentives. Hence, engineers are keen to work from metro centres despite obvious work-life imbalance owing to long-commuting hours, office politics and other such factors. When talent availability is low, IT firms are not very keen to open up centres in tier-II cities, though there are compelling reasons for doing so. Low attrition, high employee loyalty and productivity are usually seen among staffers operating from small centres. Another major hurdle in rapid growth of tier-II IT centres is reluctance on the part of senior leaders to move to these cities. It has been seen that senior executives in most IT firms prefer to stay near the headquarters or major centres. Against this backdrop, Indian IT firms have the onerous responsibility of pushing the growth of IT industry in the small centres.

Though many tier-II cities like Amritsar, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Ghaziabad, Jamshedpur, Jaipur, Kochi, Lucknow, Nagpur, Raipur, Visakhapatnam, Mysuru, Hubballi, Tirupati, Vijayawada and many others have come up in the last two decades, growth in these centres has to be expedited, which can be achieved by a slew of employee-friendly measures. Firstly, Indian IT firms should start executing complex projects from tier-II centres with the active participation of senior staffers. This will create an automatic demand for good talent in these centres and staffers will be keen to work alongside. Secondly, participation of senior management, preferably from the top management like the CEO, should increase. It will instill a sense of privileged importance among staffers working in these locations. Thirdly, and perhaps the clincher, the salary incentives and career growth opportunities should be uniform, irrespective of whether the individual is posted in a metro or a tier-II centre. At a time when IT firms are reeling under high cost pressure, it is ideal that they start implementing these measures fast for pushing up their profitability along with development of IT industry across the country.