Don't bring North-South politics into this: Zoho CEO to former Infosys CFO over 'Bengaluru ignored' post

Bengaluru: In a rebuttal to former Infosys CFO, TV Mohandas Pai’s observation on the social media platform X, that South has been ignored in the selection of centres of excellence (CoEs) for Artificial Intelligence (AI), Sridhar Vembu, founder and CEO of Zoho Corporation, urged people not to inject North-South politics into the issue.

On October 15, the Union Government announced three AI CoEs focused on healthcare, agriculture, and sustainable cities.

While Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) will jointly lead the CoE for healthcare, the one for agriculture will be housed at IIT, Ropar (in Punjab) and the other for sustainable cities will be set up at IIT, Kanpur.

A grant of Rs 990 crore has been earmarked for creation of these three centres until FY28.

Tagging Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Bengaluru MPs Tejasvi Surya and PC Mohan, as well as Union Ministers H D Kumaraswamy and Nirmala Sitharaman, Pai, on Wednesday, wrote on X, "Why are you ignoring the South and Bengaluru in IT ? Are we not part of Bharat too? Bengaluru voted for the NDA, but all we get is step-motherly treatment."

"Citizens here are very angry and upset with your repeated disregard for the South! Are we children of a lesser God here? We need our PM Modi to intervene and give us our share too. What are our MPs doing? Even our state government, for voting NDA, is ignoring us by not investing enough in Bengaluru!" he added.

Responding to this on Thursday, Vembu said, "Most of us on the selection committee came from the private sector, and the government did not tell us who we should select. The majority of our members hailed from South India."

 "The responsibility for this decision on the AI Centres of Excellence should be with us in the committee, and personally with me as Co-chair," he added.

He also revealed that the consortiums selected include southern institutions. The AI CoE on health led by the AIIMS consortium includes IISc Bengaluru and IIT Chennai.

Not to be checked, Pai returned to X asking why only three COEs were selected and demanded transparency, requesting Vembu to release the scoring and comments to the public. He insisted that there should be more COEs with India's best institutions to take the country forward.

Explaining further, Vembu wrote on X,  "These three CoEs are a start. One specific goal is to enable them to be self-sustaining after the substantial initial grant, to incentivise collaboration with industry. There is no point in spreading our resources thin right from the get-go."

Praising IISc for having a world-class medical school and for attracting world-class physician-scientists from abroad, he stated that Bengaluru is getting its due.

The Karnataka state government, last month, announced that it will establish a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for AI research in Bengaluru.