Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
2004 and 2009. After Jagan (and his mother, YSR's widow) broke from the Congress and
by-elections with Jagan's YSR party winning 15 seats.
Eventually, in August 2013, the government started the constitutional procedure to set up
a separate Telangana state, probably with Hyderabad as its joint capital for ten years. It did
this not through a well developed strategy based on sound principles of regional govern-
ment but simply because the Congress hoped that the decision would strengthen its support
base in the 2014 general election. The plan backfired, however and led to political, indus-
trial and social unrest as Jagan Reddy and others encouraged strikes that shut down power
supplies, closed schools and took buses off the roads in various parts of the state.
Business
The main business communities involved in the flow of investment into what became a
booming metropolis are the Reddys, Rajus and Raos, besides the Kammas, Komatis and
Kapus. They all come from coastal Andhra or Rayalaseema, an adjacent under-developed
region. Some of these communities have also settled in nearby states - Reddys in particular
have gone to both Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Several invested in the now famous Telugu
film industry that originated in Madras, now Chennai, the state capital of Tamil Nadu.
Hyderabad's urban growth took off when Chandrababu Naidu successfully turned it into
an international information technology centre. Naidu had become chief minister in 1995
after staging a party coup that ousted his father-in-law, N.T. Rama Rao, a famous and col-
ourful film-star-turned-politician. One of India's most focused younger state leaders, Naidu
picked on software development to be Andhra's growth engine because it involved relat-
ively low capital investment and had short lead times that enabled start-ups to begin oper-
ations quickly. It also had a faster multiplier effect than other industries because it raised
the state's international profile by attracting big names such as Microsoft, followed later by
Google, Facebook and many others to the new high-tech city.
'Here you can hire 50 good people in two or three months instead of a minimum of
six months in the US,' Srini Koppulu, an Indian-born executive from the US told me in
pulu to Hyderabad to run its new research centre. Entrepreneurial overseas Indians, who
had been running software companies in the US and elsewhere, also returned to tap local
resources. 'The time to market is a key component in the dot.com business,' said Prasad
Yenigalla, founder of California-based Magma Solutions, who had 35 employees in Hy-
derabad writing software to designs prepared by his US company. 'Here we can get new
staff fast enough to build a portal in two to three months compared with six to nine months
