“The growth of cities as I.T. hubs has opened up new avenues of employment, but has also created new problems”. Substantiate this statement with examples. (UPSC IAS Mains 2017 General Studies Paper – 1)
- Cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Mumbai, Delhi-NCR etc grew significantly and fastidiously in the last two decades owing to growth in the IT-related services sector. The employment provided by the IT sector agrees with middle-class values and aspirations, further boosting the relevance and importance of these IT hubs, and further causing inward migration to these destinations.
- Since, these IT hubs employ a considerable number of people, and since they attract a host of other related and unrelated services needed to cater to the daily needs of these employees, it causes the twin problems of over-population and over-crowding. The result is that municipal services get over-stretched, housing prices soar, traffic gets congested, prices of essential commodities inflate, and most importantly social tensions develop and increase. Sometimes, civil and police administrative machineries are also put to test in these cities. Especially in bigger cities like Delhi-NCR where IT hubs create sub-localities within the city, policing power is seen decreasing proportionately to the size and scale of a locality’s policing requirements. This is why problems like crimes against women, child abduction, racial-religious mob violence etc happen with great frequency in such places.
- Lastly, the growth of cities as IT hubs creates problems with pollution, waste disposal andenergy management. Also, E-waste generation and its associated harms, and also the strain that IT infrastructure put on the electric grid, are much bigger challenges than one would like to admit and the only way forward is to follow sustainable development practices while developing IT hubs.
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