‘I beg people to not inject…’: Zoho CEO counters Mohandas Pai's claims of Centre's neglect towards South India

Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu on Thursday addressed allegations raised by Mohandas Pai, who claimed the central government is neglecting South India in its development initiatives. 

“Minister @dpradhanbjp nothing in Bengaluru, the technology capital of India? Why are you and @AshwiniVaishnaw ignoring the South in IT, ignoring Bengaluru? Are we not part of Bharat too? Bengaluru voted for NDA but all we get is step motherly treatment,” Pai wrote on X.

“Citizens here are very angry and upset at you folks repeatedly ignoring us in the South! Are we children of a lesser God here? We need our PM @narendramodi @PMOIndia to intervene, give us our share too,” he added.

He also tagged Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, H D Kumaraswamy, Tejasvi Surya, and PC Mohan and asked, “What are our MPs doing? For voting NDA, our state government, too, is ignoring us! It is not investing enough in Bengaluru!”

Pai was referring to the launch of the AI Center of Excellence at three institutions: IIT Kanpur, IIT Ropar, IIT Delhi, and AIIMS Delhi.

Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu responds

However, negating his claims, Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu said that the committee responsible for making such decisions has enough members from South India. He wrote on X that the private sector made the decision after proper evaluation.

“The committee itself had plenty of us from the South (probably the majority). Most of us came from the private sector and the Government did not tell us who we should select. We in the committee (again with so many of us from the South and so many from the private sector) did the selection based on a very thorough evaluation of actual projects done,” Vembu wrote on X.

He requested people not to bring North-South divisive politics in such decisions. “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 and I beg people to not inject North-South politics in this,” Vembu wrote.

“IISc Bengaluru, IIT Chennai, NIT Calicut, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Mumbai all presented very strong proposals but the ones we selected stood out in the end. The committee was unanimous in this decision. We stand by our judgment,” he added.

Earlier this week, the government launched three Artificial Intelligence (AI) Centres of Excellence (CoE) for healthcare, agriculture, and sustainable cities by 2028, with the help of prominent institutions in the country, such as AIIMS, IIT Delhi, Kanpur, and Ropar.