“We started up here simply because we didn’t want to leave this place. We love the beach and the coast, and we wanted to build something without letting go of any of it,” says Mayur Shetty, CEO at BlackFrog Technologies, a medical device manufacturing company based out of Manipal. His career decisions, he says, were shaped by the question of what he could do to avoid moving to Bengaluru.
The sentiment may resonate with many.
The IT boom of the 1990s catapulted Bengaluru to being the economic powerhouse that it is today. The city’s contribution today to the State’s GSDP is disproportionately large at 43%. But the economic prosperity’s darker side reveals crumbling infrastructure, strained civic amenities and high cost of living.
It was in 2021 that the Karnataka Digital Economy Mission (KDEM) launched the Beyond Bengaluru Mission with the goal of driving distributed growth of Karnataka’s digital economy outside Bengaluru.
Almost five years down the line, multiple schemes, policies and grants have been introduced under the initiative to encourage companies to expand to tier-2 cities in the State and to boost entrepreneurship in districts. The initiative has been making progress – albeit unevenly - across clusters. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs, industry leaders and ecosystem players in these regions hope to see more in the coming days.
