Siruseri, Dec. 28: A massive futuristic office complex is rising from a patch of spare, arid land here near Chennai. Six butterfly-shaped buildings dock like spacecraft to two long metal-latticed terminals.
About 12,000 people already work at the campus, being built by India’s largest technology company, Tata Consultancy Services. It eventually will have space for 24,000 of Tata’s nearly 180,000 employees.
Meanwhile Infosys, one of Tata’s biggest competitors, has added a corporate campus for 15,000 employees with buildings that resemble the Parthenon, the Coliseum and the Louvre’s glass pyramid. Infosys plans to build an additional 10 million square feet of custom office space by mid-2012, at various sites, adding 25,000 workers to its current 122,000.
It is all part of a construction spree by India’s outsourcing companies, which are growing at a breakneck pace after the lull caused by the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009.
But the building boom is about more than making room for more workers.
The outsourcing giants, which include Wipro and others, hope that architectural sizzle can help them compete for the nation’s top software programmers, while also burnishing their reputations with overseas clients and prospective customers.
In India where world-class high-tech companies co-exist with urban slums and rural poverty, employers like Tata, Infosys and Wipro have set out to create avant-garde, environmentally smart corporate sanctuaries.
And even if some architects and critics complain about the wisdom and taste of the efforts, the executives behind the building boom say their ambitious projects put a modern face on Indian business.
Mr T.V. Mohandas Pai, a director at Infosys, which has 15 campuses around India, said his company’s eclectic mix of designs from all over the world reflected this nation’s inclusive sensibility.
“One singular thing is monotonous,” he said. “In India, we are a colorful people.”
Like China a decade earlier, India appears to be at that phase of economic development where buildings are meant to help advertise the nation’s arrival on the world stage.
But unlike China, where the government and state-owned corporations took the lead, private companies in India have headed the charge — not the government, which struggles to execute even basic construction projects.
And within India’s business world, technology companies have been more adventurous than others, perhaps because of their outsize financial success and their need to hire tens of thousands of workers to write software for foreign clients.
State and federal governments are aiding the effort by offering these companies generous tax incentives and choice pieces of real estate to build big campuses.
Competition for employees is intense, because while India produces about 500,000 engineers every year, most colleges provide such poor education that the industry says that just a quarter of graduates are employable.
But among those most qualified — typically graduates of elite places like the Indian Institutes of Technology and Birla Institute of Technology and Science — as many as 18 per cent leave for other jobs every year.
“I prefer a big campus,” said Mr Aditya Mathur, a software engineer, who joined Wipro a year ago, and now works at a four-year-old office in Gurgaon, as a software tester.