HYDERABAD: Predicting that golf will have a tremendous future in Telangana, IT and Industries Minister KT Rama Rao expressed confidence that the State would produce its own golfing superstars in the near future, just like in badminton and tennis.
During the inaugural ceremony of Callaway Group’s DigiTech Centre at Knowledge City in Hyderabad on Thursday, he said that golf was no more an elite sport, but has become a lifestyle sport which has been gaining acceptance among the upwardly mobile and urban youth these days.
He urged the tech-enabled golf company delivering golf equipment, apparel and entertainment, with a portfolio of global brands including Callaway Golf, Topgolf, Odyssey, TravisMathew and Jack Wolfskin, to also consider bringing to Hyderabad Topgolf, which is Callaway’s golf entertainment brand.
Quick approvals
Rama Rao assured the company’s top executives that the State government would provide land, quick approvals and would also help them find a partner, if they were planning on entering into a franchise for starting Topgolf’s operations in Hyderabad.“We want the best social infrastructure in this city, which has been ranked the best among all the Indian cities by Mercer, in terms of livability index,” he said.
He also said that most of the marquee companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Uber, Novartis, Qualcomm, Salesforce and Micron, had their second-largest technology centres in Hyderabad.Sailendra Koorapati, SVP, CIO, Global Information Technology, Callaway, said the decision to set up their digitech centre in Hyderabad was taken considering the availability of infrastructure, talent pool and ease of doing business enabled by the State government.