DH Bengaluru 2040 Summit | 'Racism is an increasing issue in Bengaluru,' admits Priyank Kharge

The city, which sees an influx of high-skill talent from across India for jobs, has an insider-outsider issue to deal with, panellists at DH Bengaluru 2040 Summit said.

Bengaluru: Regional chauvinism and infrastructure issues are two big challenges standing in the way of Bengaluru maintaining its position as the epicentre of India’s startup ecosystem, Karnataka IT/BT Minister Priyank Kharge said on Friday, at the DH Bengaluru 2040 Summit. His views were echoed by other panellists.

The city, which sees an influx of high-skill talent from across India for jobs, has an insider-outsider issue to deal with, they admitted.

“Racism is an increasing issue here, and I wish people were more sensitive to each other. People have left everything and come here to earn a living and constitutionally, they're welcome. They're doing the right thing,” Kharge said.

Kharge said that as a minister in the state cabinet, his priority is to work for the benefit of Kannadigas.

“I am not a union minister. If you want me to be the union minister, I'd be more than happy to do that. Wherein I will ensure that every Indian is employed. But right now, I am mandated only for the state of Karnataka. And in my job, I'm going to ensure that we have the right skill sets for our people,” said Kharge.

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“Through skilling measures, I will ensure that the top jobs will by default be for Kannadigas,” he added.

Kharge admitted that infrastructure is also a grave issue, and is a factor in attracting talent. “The government is doing more than what it can and what it should be doing to improve the infrastructure with more metro connectivity as well as newer roads,” he said.

“We are working on it and would like to assure you that probably in the next one and a half years we'll be in a much better position when it comes to the infrastructure of public transport,” he assured.

However, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CureFoods Ankit Nagori put forth another view, stating that infrastructure is never a big reason an individual plans to move to a city.

“We all moved to Bangalore because the opportunities were so much bigger and since then, of course, traffic has probably become one notch worse but that's what has happened across the world. However, like other busy and global cities, Bengaluru is also getting its underground network as we speak,” Nagori said.

There is a view that India has been left behind in the large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence, as United States and China have released apps like OpenAI ChatGPT and Deepseek respectively. The panellists were of the view that India’s response to such LLMs will come from Bengaluru.

“I think this is not only linked to a city, it's a global debate where people want to believe the game is over, somebody has won it. Essentially, AI is going to result in a massive need for exponential computation. So I think we see a large wave of support in this sector and the city is well-poised to capture that,” highlighted Zerin Rahiman, Founder, IndiGoEdge.

"The strength of the ecosystem's edge can surely be maintained as the biggest advantage Bangalore has is its people," said Balakrishna Adiga, Senior Advisor Prachetas Capital Pvt Ltd.