Jon Swartz

USA TODAY

KOLKATA, India — Across a bustling intersection from one of the first dead-letters offices, a pale blue sign beseeches pedestrians to join the future. Safely.

Several hundred feet separate old, colonial India from the promise of a new, technologically transformed country. An Uber sign urges traffic safety and a gentle nudge for the ride-sharing service, which is wildly popular here.

In Kolkata, capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, there are traces of the future amid decaying buildings and staggering poverty. Samsung Electronics and Dell signs mark the entrance to a dilapidated Victorian structure in the heart of the city.

Kolkata is India’s untold story in tech. Though an intellectual haven, it faces more obstacles than better-known, more established hubs such as Mumbai, Bangalore and New Delhi. Long a bastion of left-leaning politics and fiercely pro-union, the country's third-largest city, at 4.5 million people, is an overwhelming kaleidoscope of brown, pollution-choked skies, large-scale squalor and NASCAR-like traffic on narrow streets.

It also boasts intellectual firepower, cultural diversity and stunning architecture — all of which gives it potential to be the latest stop for expansion on which American tech companies are pinning hope for growth. ​

India, the world's largest democracy with 1.25 billion people and a $2 trillion economy, represents a potentially lucrative opportunity for U.S. companies as smartphone and Internet access begins to spread.​

The World Bank and International Money Fund have projected India will become the world’s fastest-growing major economy in the next several years, surpassing China, where Google and Facebook are blocked.

“India represents a laboratory of the future,” says Jayant Sinha, minister of state for finance for India's government, based in New Delhi. "The U.S. is the top entrepreneurial engine for the first 1 billion people, and India is that engine for the next 6 billion people."

APPLE, GOOGLE, UBER

Tech suitors are lining up.

"We see India where China was 10 years ago," Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the company’s shareholders meeting last month. (China is Apple’s No. 2 country, with $59 billion in annual sales. India is currently at $1.5 billion) The low-cost, small-screen iPhone SE, announced March 21, is targeted at India and other markets.

But "infrastructure brittleness" could make for "kinda tough sledding" in India, Cook said, referring to India's unreliable infrastructure, slow Internet speeds, bureaucratic red tape and confusing tax laws that have slowed investment. "We are confident (the lack of an LTE network) will be fixed soon," he said. "We want to be there."

Several tech giants are planting their flags. Uber's share of the market soared to 40% from 4% last year, and it plans to hire 50,000 women in India by 2020.

Google has ambitious plans to hire engineers at operations in four cities, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a recent visit to India. Amazon intends to make India its biggest market after the U.S. within a decade, where it hopes to ultimately haul in trillions of dollars. Facebook, whose No. 2 market is India, with 142 million users, has all but tied major future growth to its fortunes here. (Facebook has 1.59 billion users worldwide.) Long-time powers Hewlett Packard and IBM are firmly entrenched.

The feeling is mutual among India's political leaders and their audacious Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas ("Development for All") plan to remake the country.

“Tech is the game changer,” Sinha says. "Only through tech, can we transform India."

Sinha ticks off several goals: Improvements in transportation, education, manufacturing, skill-building, power, the judicial system, housing, the entrepreneurial ecosystem and telecom. A financial inclusion program that has made bank accounts available to every Indian household is a start, he says.

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TECH DETERRENTS

While the tech success stories of Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad are well documented. Kolkata represents a unique challenge.

Despite massive construction of commercial and residential buildings, the region continues to be beset by low credit-card acceptance and poor Internet connectivity, formidable deterrents to start-ups and established companies.

“The talent pool is like a steep pyramid, with a few overqualified at the top,” says Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain, who was born and raised in New Delhi and travels to India a few times a year. The enterprise file-service company employs 80 of its 400-person workforce in Mumbai and Jaipur, but is increasingly hiring workers in Poland.

Kolkata is an intellectual hotbed, but there is a disparity between the well-educated and everyone else, he says. Leftist sentiment is another deterrent to tech in Kolkata, which remains a trading hub for grains and spices, and has been an industrial center for car manufacturing.

“As far as tech is concerned, it is a second-tier city,” Jain says.

"The region's history has made it less attractive to tech and other industries," says Raj Koneru, CEO of Kore. "Can an impoverished area be helped by, and embrace, tech? Absolutely. Not through outsourcing, but building real skill sets."

It is happening in the heavily Muslim community of Metiabruz, in southern Kolkata. Here, in an unmarked, four-story building, is where iMerit runs one of six training-and-employment centers. More than 100 students, most of them young women, learn English and computing skills in a few months.

Graduates of the program are put to work. On one floor, a team of 50 digitally tag images of traffic to assist a German maker of autonomous vehicles. Zareen Ansri, 25, a star student, acts as the de facto chief technology officer. A floor above, images of Super Bowl 50 are crowd-sourced for Getty Images. Quality assurance reps monitor.

Radha Basu, CEO of iMerit, takes it all in, beaming.

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"It is an amazing journey for these young women," says Basu, the first female R&D engineering manager at HP who started HP India in 1986 (now a $1.2 billion business). "They feel they are making a contribution. There is an excitement to their jobs."

iMerit is tackling a crucial issue. About half of India’s population is mired in subsistence farming, and many of its youth receive educations that businesses consider substandard, making them unemployable. The situation is amplified in Kolkata, one of India's poorest, least educated regions.

“Online learning is breaking down barriers created by time, space and socioeconomic status,” says Dennis Yang, CEO of Udemy, a technology partner to Anudip, the foundation behind iMerit, which helps develop IT professionals and entrepreneurs in India’s impoverished communities. The program has helped thousands of impoverished youth, in particular women.

“It’s incredible to think that a young adult in Kolkata can learn how to code for the latest version of Apple iOS at the same time as a recent college grad working at a San Francisco start-up,” Yang says. “Education must be digital, global and on-demand to keep up with the rapidly changing needs of today’s economy.”

ANYTHING BUT A SURE THING

Sinha, a former McKinsey partner in the U.S. and India, is vague about the pace of India’s high-tech and economic transformation. He offered few specifics on its impact on poverty, air quality, agriculture, transportation, infrastructure and other aspects of life in India.

Kolkata’s situation is analogous to what most U.S. cities outside of the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston cope with when trying to attract tech business, says Ajay Arora, CEO of computer-security start-up Vera. Bangalore, like Silicon Valley, is the undisputed hub of India’s tech scene, where the vast majority of talent and R&D reside.

But as competition among companies in Bangalore escalates, creating a rise in costs and saturation of resources, companies and individuals are branching out into other cities, such as Mumbai and Hyderabad. As resources stretch thin there in an ever-expanding tech market, Kolkata and other metropolitan areas are next in line.

It’s a common cycle in tech in the U.S., where multiple “silicon regions” have emerged in Austin, Salt Lake City, New Orleans and elsewhere. “The tech hub will remain in Bangalore, but spokes will extend to other cities, like Mumbai and Kolkata, for support centers, manufacturing and other tasks,” Arora says.

What needs to improve in Kolkata and other cities, he says, are a skilled workforce, accommodating local governments, transportation access and an Anglo-speaking population.

"West Bengal is an intellectual center and culturally diverse — that's appealing" says P.K. Agarwal, CEO and Regional Dean at Northeastern University-Silicon Valley, with locations in San Jose and India. Known by residents as the "city of firsts," Kolkata is where radio-wave technology, ambulance services and tram tracks got their starts.

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MODI COURTS BIG TECH

China was the country du jour for tech companies eager to expand their financial empires beyond saturated markets in North America and Europe. But a sputtering economy and a strengthening dollar has U.S. companies increasingly turning their attention to India. Charismatic Prime Minister Narendra Modi has openly courted tech, highlighted by a trip to Silicon Valley last year.

Tech companies also see an intriguing confluence of factors.

The world is on the cusp of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, propelled by advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, nanotechnology, 3-D printing, genetics and biotechnology, according to a World Economic Forum survey.

Such advances — in the form of smart systems — will help affect changes in supply-chain management, the climate, the workplace and urbanization in India and other countries.

But for the promise of an Amazon or Uber, there is the potential backlash against a Facebook, as Facebook board member Marc Andreessen recently discovered.

When the Silicon Valley venture capitalist defended the social network’s Free Basics initiative, which provides Internet access through simplified phone applications, with a snarky tweet viewed as pro-colonialism, hundreds protested and Facebook rebuked Andreessen.

Andreessen chided India after regulators here nixed the zero-data program on the grounds mobile phone companies should not be allowed to “shape the users’ Internet experience” by providing free access only to certain services.

Yet Facebook and others forge ahead, drawn by the opportunity and potential wealth of India.

"If you want to change the world, you want to change it here," Sinha says.

Follow USA TODAY San Francisco Bureau Chief Jon Swartz @jswartz