The Information Technology-Business Process Management (IT-BPM) sector is predicted to lease 100 million square feet by 2026, according to the report ‘Tech-Towns of the Future’, published by Savills India, a global property consultancy business.
During the last half-decade, the IT-BPM sector has been absorbing big office spaces. Its current market share is expected to be more than half of all office space leased in the last five years. Over the next five years, it is predicted that 80-120 million sq. ft. of space in grade-A office buildings, including co-working spaces, will be taken up.
In the evolution of tier-II and III cities as supplemental ecosystems to the previously established IT-BPM locales, factors such as ‘Work from Anywhere’ and talent relocation to their hometowns are crucial.
Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, and Nagpur benefit from established IT-BPM hubs such as Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Thane, and Pune. All the southern cities benefit from the presence of Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai.
Gujarat’s cities, particularly Ahmedabad, have a track record of attracting multinational corporations and corporations. This is apparent in the ease with which these cities conduct business. Both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have aggressive government programmes aimed at recruiting IT-BPM firms.
Home-grown skilled talent is abundant in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh. Furthermore, if remote working becomes more common, the talent pool in these states will want to work from cities closer to their homes.
But more interesting than the growth, is the emergence of new locations as hotspots for the sector. Savills India’s Research has conducted a comprehensive statistical analysis and presented these upcoming locations as clusters namely ‘challenger cities’ and ‘emerging cities’.
Working from a universe of over 100 cities across the country, they narrowed down to 33 cities in the final analysis, using population, level of economic activity, Infrastructure, Human Capital, Costs, Industry presence as well as Vulnerabilities & Risks as the decision drivers. As the tech-sector workforce gets increasingly used to hybrid work culture, the key for IT-BPM companies will be to understand these locations for efficient operations in future.
