Nashik poised

Talents, aptitude aren't location specific. They often shoot from places least expected. For that matter, Nashik too was never an exception to this and it was only that the sea of talent from here always flowed to bigger cities for better opportunities. Fortunately, with the passage of time the brain drain has stopped to some extent and the spark in the people here is now more evident. While the IT industry may not be as huge as in other cities, the unexplored chunk of talented IT professionals and engineers can definitely rouse interest among IT and BPO companies outside Nashik. Last year, a renowned global IT and business process outsourcing organisation that set up a centre in Nashik in 2007, chose its Nashik centre for the quality award for 2010, despite it having centers in Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and other cities. Elated by the large scale five star ratings from the customers to this centre, its director decided to put an even bigger set up in Nashik that can accommodate at least 5000 employees. Says Piyush Somani, CEO of ESDS Datacentre, "Nashik has talent and I am confident about the research skills of professionals here. In fact the researches of IT engineers are even better than those happening elsewhere. For instance, our team developed Intelligent Cloud, a cloudcomputing platform that brings down the load on websites during peak traffic. Who has done this before? Talk about taking care of e-governance, core banking implementation, and our professionals have been most successful in this." Nashik has all the reasons to be the next Hyderabad, Bangalore or Pune and the reasons are aplenty, say gloStream's Milind Ghyar and his Nairobian partner Yaw Kwakye, who founded gloStream, an electronic medical record (EMR) and practice management software company in Nashik. This once a pilgrimage town now has everything that makes it an apt location for industries - it's equidistant from Mumbai, Pune and Surat. The climatic conditions are perfect; road, rail and air connectivity have improved considerably while skilled and unskilled manpower is still in abundance. It is because of all these reasons that the government approved setting up the first Special Economic Zone on 2500 acres 20 kms away from Nashik. This SEZ is being developed successfully by Indiabulls and MIDC. Since over a year, the Nashik Engineering Cluster too is operating successfully and this region also has a major advantage of being part of Rs 3.6 lakh crore-Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor. Meanwhile, Chairman and Managing Director of Rishabh Instruments, Narendra Goliya foresees a huge development once the four laning work between Nashik and Mumbai is fully completed. "People love to work in Nashik. A lot of industries will be eager to come to Nashik after this. All that the government needs to do is enhance the connectivity of the city with adjoining towns like Igatpuri, Trimbakeshwar, Sinnar, etc so that the issue of workers and availability of land is resolved. This way the entire region around Nashik will be developed." Agrees Deepak Khadke and Swanand Khadke of the Ketki Group. "The bigger cities around Nashik are reaching a saturation point. The cost of living is rising. Thus it is Nashik which has all the advantage in the future." In a nutshell, it is just a matter of time that Nashik and its people begin calling all shots.