In our previous article “Are skyrocketing of real estate prices a development“, we discussed that big buildings and constructions in the city outskirts are not the metrics to measure the development of the city. If this is not development, then what is development? Real development means “Excellence”.
Excellence of the city means better quality of life of people in city, excellent education, more number of decent jobs and more. We will discuss this excellence in this article.
Better educational system
You may wonder why I am pointing out at the educational institutions in Hyderabad. We have many schools and colleges in the city but the issue here is many educational institutions have become commercial. The quality of education has disintegrated a lot. Tell me how come our students get 595+ marks in SSC, multiple 1st ranks in EAMCET and still struggle to do well at national and international level?
Our education institutions are mass producing robots with enhanced memories that cannot think (similar to those in Rajinikanth’s movie Robo). They cannot take decisions in real life on their own.
Educational institutions should create skilled and committed workforce in professional, literal arts, science, commerce and other vocational skills.
We need better education system where schools produce good citizens, who go and become noble laureates, high impact employees and ultimately people who enhance the human civilization. Quality workforce helps build reputed employers and many such employers create a great city. Reputed employers grow and create more jobs for new passouts.
Vibrant city economy with thriving Hyderabad headquartered businesses
Growth means increase in number of vibrant and sustainable Hyderabad headquartered businesses. Unfortunately, today, in Hyderabad only two kinds of companies are doing well. One, the government offices or companies that work with the support of government or politicians. Companies that work with the support of politicians will only loot public money (taxes). There will be no real benefit to citizens from them. Others are the foreign IT companies, to whom the government is throwing red carpet while neglecting private small and medium sized companies. The foreign companies just extract too many freebies and in Hyderabad they tend to always stay outside the outskirts.
Domestic small and medium professional businesses are permanent in the city and provide lot of employment opportunities to the youngsters of the city. As the population in the city is growing at rapid pace, lakhs of jobs will be needed to accommodate all the young people in the future. Establishing hundreds of small professional businesses will create at least thousands of jobs (If one small business provides 10 jobs, 10 thousand small businesses can provide 1 lakh jobs).
Encouraging professional small companies inside the city will help create a vibrant economy in each and every city locality of Hyderabad.
Hyderabad based companies need to make positive impact at national level
Hyderabad is a city of branch offices of national companies or Indian headquarters for foreign companies. Nowhere is the lack of development more obvious than in the growth of solid national level companies from Hyderabad. Not a single Hyderabad based company is listed in India’s Superbrand list.
Leave alone the growth of good companies, we have seen a significant number of big Hyderabad based companies being associated with frauds. There are many big companies that belonged to city couldn’t last long because of their greed and lack of competence.
For example, Satyam’s $1 billion scam was one of the biggest IT scam in India. Nagarjuna Finance, Krushi Urban Co-operative Bank, etc. ran way with public money and could not repay the fixed deposits collected. Companies like Sierra Atlanta, Intelligroup, AppLabs sold off to foreign companies like Hitachi, NTT and CSC respectively as promoter loses interest in running the business.
Most big Hyderabad companies tend to do business with government rather than do business with customers. Literally, many big industrialists from AP have been questioned for quid-pro-quo deals with respect to investigation of misuse of power and siphoning government treasury.
Hyderabadis need to excel in multiple areas at international level
Building reputation means, winning prestigious national and international awards in various fields. Brands from Hyderabad should get recognized at national and international level. Universities from the city should get listed in global top rankings. But the scenario is totally different.
- No noble prize from Hyderabad city. Read more on Nobel Prizes from India here
- Before Independence, Sir Ronald Ross did his research on malaria and helped the entire world by discovering that malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes
- No Telugu movie got nominated for Oscar in last 31 years
- No university from Hyderabad got listed in global rankings. Read more about Indian universities’ performance at national level and international level.
- New institutions like IIIT and IIT, Hyderabad have either not made any impression. Institutes like ISB, Hyderabad have been associated with fraud
Foolishness of thinking buildings and expansion of city as development
Many people lead us to believe that development is the increase in price of land and expanding the horizon of the city. This is more of personal enrichment of a few, who have lots of black money and put in real estate as everyone knows that the government land rates are typically only 20 to 25% of the market rate. This allows people with black money to deploy their black money into unproductive assets.
Urgent need to build the reputation of Hyderabad back
It is better for Hyderabad to be a sleeping city and city with good reputation. With lot of scams and corruption, Hyderabad city has lost its reputation and there is an urgent need to build the reputation back.
Development of the city must also be sustainable, where needs of present generation are attained and at the same time the needs of future generations are also not compromised.