Betting on a Homegrown Tech Hub: The Software Technology Park Experiment

I've written before about the freelance and IT outsourcing boom that's grown fairly organically across the country. The government's parallel bet has been more deliberate and top-down, purpose-built software technology parks offering tax holidays, reliable power and internet infrastructure, and subsidized office space meant to concentrate the growing tech sector into hubs the way similar parks helped catalyze IT industries in India and Vietnam.

The pitch behind this strategy makes sense on paper. Concentrated infrastructure investment is more efficient than trying to guarantee reliable power and connectivity everywhere at once, and clustering companies together can generate the kind of talent-sharing and informal knowledge spillover that made hubs like Bangalore so successful. Several of these parks, across multiple cities beyond just Dhaka, have opened with genuinely modern facilities built specifically for tech company needs.

Where I think the honest assessment gets more complicated is occupancy and actual economic impact relative to the investment made. Several of these parks have filled more slowly than initial projections suggested, and some tenant companies have been smaller, more domestically focused firms rather than the large-scale export-oriented software companies the parks were originally designed to attract, and to retain against the pull of remote work for overseas clients or outright emigration for engineers chasing higher salaries abroad.

I don't think this means the strategy was wrong, infrastructure investments like this often take longer to pay off than the initial announcements suggest, and some of these parks may still mature into the hubs they were designed to be. But I think it's honest to say the tech park model has underdelivered relative to its own stated ambitions so far, and I'd want to see a harder look at why before more capital gets committed to expanding it further.