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Of course, some of these controversial politicians have the way of becoming the darlings of the Western media. Anyway, here goes one story...FN A High-Tech Fix for One Corner of India An Indian politician has moved decisively to transform Hyderabad into a computer programming and pharmaceuticals hub that is trying to rival Bangalore. [ Full story at...(requires free registration)... .ed ] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/27/technology/27RUPE.html?today sheadlines December 27, 2002 A High-Tech Fix for One Corner of India By KEITH BRADSHER HYDERABAD, India — Soon after N. Chandrababu Naidu became chief minister of the state of Andhra Pradesh in August 1995, he ordered that a partly built and abandoned government building here on the edge of the city be finished and turned into a college for computer software engineers. Today, the building houses one of 300 institutions of higher learning in a state that graduates 65,000 engineers a year, compared with 7,500 when Mr. Naidu took office. The institute is one example of how Mr. Naidu has moved decisively to transform Hyderabad from the quiet administrative center of an agricultural state into a computer programming and pharmaceuticals hub that is trying to rival Bangalore, nearly 300 miles to the south. With a businesslike, long-term approach to public policy in a country long bedeviled by populists pursuing short-term fixes, Mr. Naidu, who is 52, has become the darling of Western governments and corporations. He has emerged in their eyes as one of the most promising local leaders not just in India but in the developing world. Big international companies like Microsoft and Oracle have been setting up operations here in Hyderabad, even though Andhra Pradesh has long been one of the poorest states in India. "It's only the last four or five years that this place is booming," said Maruvada V. Raman, the executive officer of the college, the International Institute of Information Technology. "These things might not have happened if someone else were in his place." Mr. Naidu's successes have made him a hit for the last six years at World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland, and elsewhere, where he has moderated panels and been praised as an example for other leaders of poor regions. His agreeing to appear is a breakthrough of sorts for the chief minister of an Indian state. Other chief ministers — whose responsibilities are similar to those of a governor of an American state — have avoided the event for fear of hurting populist credentials by hobnobbing with corporate leaders. "They are all thinking, `We will get a negative image,' " Mr. Naidu said. "It is not true." Mr. Naidu added, "If you do not meet business people and rich people, you will not get investment." He has watched the success of Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, and tried to turn Hyderabad into sort of a Route 128 high- technology region to match. Andhra Pradesh has been developing so quickly that although rural areas in the state still have many problems, the departing Treasury secretary, Paul H. O'Neill, quipped in a visit here last month that the state no longer even seemed to need foreign aid. "I don't think he needs any help at all," Mr. O'Neill said. "I was really impressed with him and what he is doing." That was an exaggeration. Hyderabad, home to about 6.6 million people, has become a green, prosperous hub for computer programming, telephone call centers and drug manufacturing. But most of the state's 76 million people still live in rural villages where change has been slow, and where a two-year drought has brought considerable suffering. Andhra Pradesh is nonetheless becoming an international model for certain public policies. Some involve little details, like using automation to cut the time needed to get a new driver's license to two hours from two days, or quintupling the number of trees in Hyderabad to make it one of India's greenest, most livable cities. Mr. Naidu has also been one of the first Indian politicians to tackle a problem that has effectively bankrupted most of the country's state governments: electricity subsidies. State politicians across India have long won elections by promising cheap electricity, a middle- class subsidy in a country where the poor have no access to electricity at all. Electricity has been kept so cheap in most of the country that it has been uneconomical to build new power plants or even maintain many power cables, resulting in frequent lengthy blackouts that force businesses to buy and run their own diesel generators. Murky laws have long discouraged private investment in power generation and distribution, although efforts are now under way in New Delhi to change this. Despite sometimes-violent street protests in the late 1990's, Mr. Naidu has succeeded in raising electricity prices here by 70 percent. He has used the extra revenue not just to improve the electrical grid, so blackouts are now uncommon and brief, but also to improve many other public services and to come close to balancing the state budget. Under Mr. Naidu, Andhra Pradesh has enacted a law requiring union leaders to be workers from the factory or office they represent. Outside political activists have sometimes used Indian labor unions in struggles between political parties instead of seeking better contracts for the workers. Andhra Pradesh has also relaxed some of the restrictions on laying off workers, removing a major obstacle that has discouraged many businesses in India from hiring additional employees. To the anger of public-sector unions in a country famous for its slow-moving and often unresponsive bureaucracy, Mr. Naidu has begun measuring state employees against one another and preset targets, and he has instituted surprise inspections. He has fired 50 people just in the state's agriculture department and disciplined many more for nonperformance. One of Mr. Naidu's early moves as chief minister was to buttonhole Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, at a dinner party at the home of the American ambassador in New Delhi. "I told him I needed 10 minutes exclusively," Mr. Naidu recalled. "I had a presentation for him on a laptop, and the 10-minute meeting stretched to 40 minutes — the dinner was late." Microsoft later opened a 150-person programming center here, and Mr. Gates announced on a visit to the city on Nov. 14 that the company would expand the office to 500 people over the next three years. That is particularly good news here because Hyderabad, like other technology centers, has been hurt by the bursting of the Internet bubble, although employers are still looking for engineers with more academic or professional experience. Chitra Sood, Microsoft's finance and human relations manager here, said that the company had 50 serious applicants for each programming job here. Although Andhra Pradesh seems to have received another windfall with the recent discovery of natural gas fields off its coast, the state, like the rest of India, still faces serious economic problems. Looking out the window of his helicopter during a recent trip across the state, Mr. Naidu pointed to several wide lines of brown mud that meandered across a drought-parched farming area. "Generally, all these rivers flow with water — you can see there is no water now," he said. A small Maoist insurgency has attacked trains and buses for years in remote jungles in the state. More disturbing, a bomb exploded outside a Hindu temple here, wounding 20 people, three hours after Mr. O'Neill left the city. Mr. Naidu reached the site in less than half an hour and publicly emphasized that there was no proof that the explosion was religiously motivated. There was no sectarian violence after the blast, as might have happened in northern India. Taking on middle-class electricity users and the public-sector unions has forced Mr. Naidu to articulate a vision of efficient government. He has also needed the uncommon political nimbleness and even ruthlessness that got him to the top in the first place. The son of a middle-class farmer from near Hyderabad, he studied economics as an undergraduate at a college outside Madras and started but never completed graduate work in the field. He was elected to the state assembly of Andhra Pradesh in 1978 as a member of the Congress Party, and he almost immediately became the minister of technical education, making him the state's youngest assembly member and youngest minister at 28. He also became a friend of Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao, a famous film star from Andhra Pradesh, and married Mr. Rao's daughter in what Mr. Naidu described as an arranged marriage. Mr. Rao entered politics in 1982, setting up a regional party, Telugu Desam, and Mr. Naidu left the Congress Party to join it. With Mr. Rao's popularity from appearing in more than 300 movies, together with an appeal to regional pride, the party gained control of the state assembly, and Mr. Rao served three terms as chief minister. But when Mr. Rao, a widower, married a much younger woman who sought political power on her own, Mr. Naidu deposed Mr. Rao in 1995. He took control of the party with help from one of Mr. Rao's sons and replaced his father-in-law as chief minister. Mr. Rao publicly compared himself to Shah Jehan, a 17th-century Mogul emperor imprisoned by his son, and he vowed to return to power and destroy his son-in-law. But Mr. Rao died of a heart attack early in 1996, leaving Mr. Naidu in complete control of the Telugu Desam Party. The party's hold on power seems secure in Andhra Pradesh, partly because Mr. Naidu and his allies speak Telugu, a language spoken only in this state and by a few people in two adjacent states. He has also maintained a variety of popular subsidy programs for rural areas, even while forcing urban middle-class families to pay more for electricity. But while some corporate executives say they wish Mr. Naidu would seek national office, he disclaims any such ambition, and his party's local and linguistic roots could hinder him if he tried. Mr. Naidu's own command of English is very good but not perfect. He admitted that he spoke little Hindi, the language of much of northern India, although he understands it. Krishnamoorthy Thiagarajan, the senior vice president for corporate strategy at Satyam Computer Services, a big Indian software company based here, said that Mr. Naidu nonetheless set an example that could begin to influence other Indian politicians. "Politicians tend to look at `Can I win my next election?' and if it takes subsidies, then that is often done," Mr. Thiagarajan said. Mr. Naidu, he continued, "looks at something in business terms, in metrics, in measurable things you can improve." Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company ------- WANT TO check out which mailing lists you could subscribe to? 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