The term “Silicon Valley” refers to a geographic location in California, but is also a figure of speech which refers to America’s high tech center, are their developments of other “Silicon Valleys” in other places outside of the United States?
The article that I found on the George Mason University Database, “Is the Next Silicon Valley Taking Root in Bangalore?”, describes the development of high tech corporations in Bangalore, India. The article talks about a number of small start up companies that could grow to be huge corporations within the next fifteen to twenty years. These small start ups employ a number of ambitious engineers and are housed in building that has enough space to house the employees and provide them with a kitchen to make meals and a bathroom. One start up company also had a section in the back of the building that served as a small accounting office that provided services to many Americans visiting Bangalore and provided a large amount of the income for this start up, Read-Ink. What I found surprising about what I read was that most of these employees have degrees from the United States at such highly regarded universities as Stanford. This article also talks about how many US companies outsource to India because doing business there is cheaper and those doing the work were educated at some of the best schools in the United States. American politicians and executives have begun to take notice of the growing appeal Bangalore and generally react in one of two ways: they themselves begin to take advantage of the opportunities Bangalore has to offer or they fight against what they believe to be a brain drain of American technological innovation. There are hundreds maybe even thousands of these start ups around Bangalore and many of them, much lie Read-Ink, are trying to stay under the radar so that they may grow and expand without intervention.
In Article Finder, I found a source, in the Cambridge South Asian Archive, which describes Bangalore in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. I found what I read from this source interesting because it serves as a point of reference in order to compare modern Bangalore with the state of Bangalore over a century ago, and it allowed me to look at how the city has developed. Looking through the information provided by this source in combat ion with my own knowledge of what was going on in the world at this time, the city of Bangalore, and India as its own country, has developed significantly. The most significant featured that I pulled from the reading was that because India was still a colony in the late eighteenth century, many of its resources were exploited, whereas now countries in the Western world still exploit citizens in cities such as Bangalore, but now these citizens are being used because of their knowledge rather than hard labor or resources. Because of this factor, and because many of these people want to build companies and corporations of their own, they pose a threat to Western nations and this is where the problem lies. Western politicians and executives, those who are not outsourcing to India themselves, are afraid that the Silicon Valley will keeps it name but that the United States will lose its position as the hub for high tech innovation to India’s Silicon Valley, Bangalore.
Photo taken of Bangalore at night from Flickr
Leave a response