Reflections for the Non-Resident Chhattisgarhi Summit
In 2013, when a few of us started a small technology company in Bhilai, the list of technology firms operating out of Chhattisgarh was short enough to recite from memory. The state was thirteen years old. Its industrial identity was steel, coal, and power. For a young engineer graduating from a college in Raipur, Bhilai, or Bilaspur, the career map had exactly one route on it, and that route began at a railway platform. Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad, Gurugram. The move was not a choice anyone deliberated over. It was simply what happened next.
We did not begin with a services company. We began with technology training, and we began with it for a reason that had less to do with business and more to do with a question we genuinely could not answer: was the talent actually here? Everyone assumed it was not. That assumption was doing a great deal of quiet damage, and nobody had tested it.
Three years of training answered the question, and the answer was not ambiguous. The talent was here. What was missing was not raw ability, aptitude, or work ethic. What was missing was guidance, exposure to how software is engineered for global clients, and a platform on which that ability could be applied to real problems with real consequences. Give a bright graduate from a tier-three engineering college in Durg the same mentorship and the same standards that a graduate in Bengaluru receives by default, and the output is indistinguishable. We stopped debating this internally around 2016.
The second discovery took longer to see, and it has turned out to matter more
Not everyone wants to leave. A substantial number of young people would prefer to build serious careers close to their parents, in cities whose rhythms they understand, among people they grew up with, if such careers were available to them. Migration was not, for most of them, an aspiration. It was the absence of an alternative. We had been reading a supply problem where there was actually a demand problem.
When we moved from training into technology services in 2017, we saw this play out in a way we had not planned for. People who had spent six, eight, ten years in metros began reaching out to ask whether there was work of comparable seriousness back home. Some had aging parents. Some had young children and wanted them to grow up near grandparents. Some had simply done the arithmetic on ninety-minute commutes and rent. They came back, and, more tellingly, they stayed.
What we watched over the following years was a compounding effect that no incentive scheme could have manufactured. An engineer with a fifteen-minute commute and family a short drive away has a materially different life than one spending three hours a day in traffic. Better value for money, better value for time. Families were settled, which meant employees were settled. Stable, contented teams produce better engineering, because quality in software is largely a function of continuity: people who stay long enough to understand a client’s business deeply, and who care enough to defend it. Clients noticed. Client satisfaction produced longer engagements, longer engagements produced more roles, and more roles gave the next returning professional a reason to come back. Everyone in the chain won, and the chain reinforced itself.
None of this required heroics. It required only that the opportunity exist locally
Chhattisgarh’s institutional base makes this more achievable now than it was in 2013. NIT Raipur has been producing engineers for decades. IIT Bhilai, IIIT Naya Raipur, IIM Raipur, and Hidayatullah National Law University have joined it, alongside a wide network of state and private engineering colleges. The pipeline of capable young people is not thin, and it is not going to become thin. The structural question facing the state is not how to produce technologists. It is how to give them a reason to stay, and how to give those who already left a reason to return.
With that framing, a few things seem worth the attention
Build demand density, not showpieces. Thirty technology firms employing two hundred people each will do more for Chhattisgarh than one firm employing six thousand. A young professional evaluating whether to stay is not asking whether one good job exists. They are asking whether their second and third jobs exist, whether they can change employers without changing cities. Density creates that confidence. Policy should reward the mid-sized firm and the growing firm, not only the marquee announcement.
Make the state a serious buyer of local technology. Governments are large customers. Procurement that gives credible local firms a genuine path to state contracts builds capability faster than most subsidies, and the state gets systems built by people who will still be around to maintain them.
Close the last mile between college and employability. The gap between a curriculum and a client-ready engineer is roughly six months of focused work. That gap can be closed inside the degree: industry-designed final-year modules, paid internships that are real work rather than certificates, and working engineers teaching as adjunct faculty. This is inexpensive and immediately effective.
Sell the life honestly. Chhattisgarh’s genuine advantage is not cost arbitrage; that argument gets won by whoever is cheapest next year. The advantage is quality of life: short commutes, affordable housing, proximity to family, unhurried cities. That case is worth making explicitly, with real numbers, to professionals in Bengaluru and Pune who have never once been asked to consider it.
Invest in connectivity as infrastructure. Direct air links to major domestic hubs, redundant bandwidth, and reliable power are not amenities for a technology sector. They are its floor. A client who cannot reach Raipur easily will not build a team here.
Chhattisgarh does not need to invent a talent base. It has one. What it needs is to make ambition and belonging compatible, so that a bright twenty-two-year-old in Bilaspur in 2027 does not have to interpret leaving as the price of success. That is an achievable state of affairs, and parts of it are already working.
