The HITEC city

Hyderabad is overly proud of the swanky HITEC city – (Hyderabad Information Technology Engineering Consultancy) aka Cyberabad. This place houses offices to some of the software powerhouses like MS, ORACLE, GOOGLE – Indian Giants like TCS, Wipro,Infosys and Satyam besides numerous other BPOs, KPOs ,LPOs and God knows what 

Every other person here worth his/her own salt (except perhaps the auto-cab drivers , street vendors and the naked child beggars who cajole you for money once you stop at a red signal) has a ID card here. Having an ID card gives you special rights – it will get your work done at a bank, you don’t have to wait at queues for long(unless you are really dumb!), you have access to places. People look down on you if you don’t possess one.

A friend remarked once, “The HITEC city has been sold ( to IT companies) in the name of the Cyber Tower.”

Chandrababu Naidu the IT-savvy former CM of AP salted the HITEC mines to the firangs. The Cyber Tower stands tall in the bosom of HITEC city – its a crowded place at the intersection of busy roads. The traffic is slow as usual – at peak hours lines upto 2-3 kms are not uncommon! This problem is compounded by the utter lack of traffic sense among people. Cutting lanes , jumping signals and tripping is very common (more about HYD traffic later in other post).