Kolkata, March 19: Bangalore, NCR and Mumbai have taken a lead in the formation of technology start-ups while Kolkata has been left behind due to paucity of IT product managers, a top Nasscom official said.
“In Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai, there are a lot of IT companies and innovation centres which are churning out numerous product managers. These managers are instrumental in setting up technology start-ups,” head of Kolkata chapter of Nasscom’s Start-up Warehouse Ravi Ranjan said on Friday.
Lack of IT companies in West Bengal decreases the supply of IT product managers, Ranjan said, adding that this was why global majors like Google, Amazon and Microsoft have not been able to set up their bases here.
With the support of the IT department of the state government, Nasscom started a Start-up Warehouse in January 2015.
Ranjan said that by the end of last year, 250 applications had been submitted, out of which only 26 were approved.
These 26 applicants were given space at a nominal rent inside the Nasscom office premises here for developing their products.
Out of the 26, five have successfully started their start-ups, namely IManageMyHotel (travel), Seenit (fashion technology), EazyCoach (education), Applop (mobile app) and Zeroinfy (education).
Ranjan said these start-ups have raised seed funding from angel investors.
Unlike Bangalore, there are no innovation labs here and only IIT-Kharagpur and IIM-Calcutta have incubation centres, he said.
Companies like Tukitaki (which has partnered Facebook), was set up in Kolkata but had to move out to Bengaluru in 2013 for want of an ecosystem in the state.
Sounding optimistic, he said the potential of the city is high as there are many good academic institutions like ISI, IIM and IIT, besides support from the state government.
Ranjan said Kolkata needs some good success stories which would increase the interest about the city.
For this, there should be a clutch of mentors and local investors.
To give a boost to the sector, West Bengal framed a start-up policy in January 2016 under the aegis of the MSME department.
