After Murthy, it’s Azim Angry Premji: We may need morcha to wake up the govt

If Murthy hit out at the Centre for not ‘‘bothering to reply’’ to his request for more Lufthansa flights from Bangalore, Premji today said the Karnataka government was doing nothing to develop the Sarjapur area where Wipro is based.

‘‘At one stage, we showed them (a client) a world-class facility, world-class quality, world-class delivery and, in a one-hour meeting, the power goes out four times,’’ a visibly irritated Premji said.

‘‘The Government is just not investing money to expand it,’’ Premji told reporters while declaring the first quarter results of the company at the sprawling Wipro campus on the city’s outskirts.

Wipro made Sarjapur its base around six years ago. And today, Premji said the infrastructure wasn’t there to support an expansion. ‘‘We will just use this facility for very marginal expansion of our training centres,’’ Premji said.

‘‘We have no plans at this point of time to use this facility for a software development centre. We just think this area is not able to support the traffic requirement, people requirement of a software development centre. Or, for that matter, a BPO centre.’’

The other major headache: power supply. ‘‘Power problems continue to be prevalent here. We are increasingly dependent on generating our own power,’’ he said.

He recalled how there were four power shutdowns once, in the space of an hour, during a senior customer’s visit to the campus. ‘‘We have frequent power-cuts, which is an irritation. You have a lot of senior customers who visit here and in a meeting which lasts for an hour, you have four power cuts. It is a very major embarrassment,’’ he said.

Pointing to the tough times that the software industry had to go through before Electronics City was properly developed, the Wipro chairman said: ‘‘The roads had not been properly built there (Electronic City) and the software industry had to take a morcha to the Government to kickstart the construction. I think we are heading towards a similar situation in Sarjapur.’’

Premji also made a note of multiple accidents taking place on Sarjapur Road. ‘‘What we are finding is that Sarjapur Road is increasingly getting bottlenecked. And it is becoming quite a hazard,’’ he said.

Blaming the problem on unchecked commercial growth, he said: ‘‘The system does not have the capacity to take it.’’ He said the way land was being converted into commercial and residential use, traffic would come to a halt in another year and a half.

‘‘Every nook and corner of the land is being converted, completely choking the area,’’ Premji said.