Bangalore IT.com, a five-day conference that opened in the city, aims to re-establish the city as the software capital of India. Business leaders, however say Bangalore appears to be slipping due to growing problems of infrastructure and competition from neighboring regions. But Bangalore refuses to give up without a fight. This year the rapidly growing city has already approved software projects worth $476m. It also plans to introduce information technology for engineering graduates to meet the need for experts, launch a software venture capital fund to help small firms and set up a school for internet studies. In addition, road shows are planned in the United States and Japan to market Bangalore as the ‘best bet for information technology companies’. Newsweek recently quoted Indian city Bangalore among the top 10 techno-towns in the world along with Boston, Washington and ‘the Microsoft City’. Of the remaining nine, seven are in the US and one each in Britain and Israel. Boston leads the list with 3,600 information technology companies followed by Washington with over 3,000 companies and Seattle with 2,500.
