Opinion The zing thing

he lands a job in Bangalore or elsewhere.

Bangalore is the overwhelming choice for engineers who are first-time job seekers,says a pan-India survey by Aspiring Minds,a Gurgaon-based employability testing firm run by a duo of engineers,one trained at IIT Delhi and the other at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Aspiring Minds polled 19,000 fresh engineers and soon-to-be-engineers and found that Bangalore scored over every other Indian city,polling 72 per cent of the location votes. Delhi NCR (with Gurgaon and Noida) got 32 per cent votes,Hyderabad bested Chennai and Pune topped Mumbai.

Clearly,India’s rookie engineers are dreaming of jobs in younger cities,illustrating a changing dynamic between India,old and new.

“The openness and the youngness of a city — its zing factor — makes a huge difference,” says Himanshu Aggarwal,the IIT Delhi-educated founder and director of Aspiring Minds. “These are 21- or 22-year-old Indians,just starting out on their first job,and they are drawn towards the vibrancy and energy of India’s new metros,” says Aggarwal.

Cities like Bangalore,Pune,Hyderabad and the NCR define modernity and appear to be the path out of small-town India for many educated,qualified Indians. Of course,the job profile,company branding and salary hold undoubted sway while choosing the first jobs.

At the same time,India’s young cities offer the widest spectrum of jobs and the maximum opportunity for fresh engineering graduates,not just in technology-related fields but in others as well,says Aggarwal.

Attitudinally,India’s rising metros like Bangalore,Pune and Hyderabad are well matched with India’s young demographic,says Harish Bijoor,a brand consultant in Bangalore,explaining the trend. “These cities are full of young people,their culture is very mixed and that is welcoming and comforting to other young people,” says Bijoor. Established metropolises like Kolkata,Mumbai and New Delhi have become increasingly associated with old-economy enterprises,old family,old money,and staid bureaucracy,he says.

Not so long ago,Bangalore had the reputation of a city where little work was done and nobody delivered on time. Swalpa adjust maadi (compromise a little) was the humorous mantra of the old Bangalore resident.

But that has changed. Bangalore and many of the newer Indian metros have a strong entrepreneurial culture and an eco-system supportive of new ideas. They add up to a powerhouse of skills,entrepreneurship and connections to the global economy. They offer young Indians the promise of economic opportunity.

However,India’s younger cities magnify not just successes but also its failures. They are crowded,their roads are congested and urban planning has clearly not kept up with young India’s ambitions for these cities.

Yet the Aspiring Minds dream city survey further accentuates the “young” city pattern with newer young cities like Mysore,Chandigarh,Mangalore and Coimbatore making the cut,vying with older metros Mumbai and Chennai as choices for young engineers. The divide between cities will only get more pronounced with time,says Bijoor. Every other Indian is 25 or younger,but the people governing cities are usually 70 or older. “The older cities will need to reinvent themselves or the younger cities will race ahead,” he says.