Bengaluru Home to More Tech Graduates Than Mumbai, Delhi

BENGALURU: The city has the highest number of engineering graduates in the country, newly-released figures from the 2011 national census reveal. Mumbai and Delhi trail Bengaluru.

Karnataka has long been a leader in engineering education, and Bengaluru is ranked among the top tech cities in the world.

Job opportunities in the city attract engineers and technically-qualified people from all over India.

According to an educational census whose results were released recently, 6 per cent (4.66 lakh) of the 73.12 lakh engineering graduates in the country live in Bengaluru.

In comparison, the number in other centres such as the Mumbai Metropolitan Area (comprising Mumbai, Mumbai Suburban, Thane and Raigarh districts) is 3.37 lakh, Delhi 2.43 lakh, Chennai 2.03 lakh, Hyderabad 1.15 lakh and Kolkata 0.57 lakh.

Bengaluru, a start-up hub, is home to more engineering graduates than large states like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal and Rajasthan.

Pioneer Efforts: According to Balaveera Reddy, former vice-chancellor of Visvesvaraya Technological University, Karnataka has been a pioneer in tech education since Independence.

“By the time there was an IT boom in the ‘90s, Karnataka had more than 70 engineering colleges. No other state had as many, and people from across the country came here to study engineering,” he said.

Balachander N, president, Bengaluru chapter of the National Human Resource Development Network, said the status of ‘Silicon City’ bestowed on Bengaluru had also served as a magnet attracting tech graduates.

“Large IT firms are based here, and the city enjoys good weather,” he said.

After Hewlett Packard launched its first offshore unit in Bengaluru in the ‘80s, tech firms sprang up and grew rapidly.

Gerald Jayadeep, Chief Operating Officer of SimpliLearn, an e-learning and certification company, has watched the city transform rapidly into a tech magnet.

“It has grown from a pensioners’ paradise to a technology space in a span of two-and-a-half decades,” he said.

Murali Padmanabhan, vice-president of Virtusa, a software consulting and outsourcing firm, believes Bengaluru is a brand associated with software the world over.

“It is considered a city of opportunities. In the early stages of the IT boom, Westerners found it easy to mix with people here because of the city’s cosmopolitan culture,” he told Express.

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