New Delhi: According to a study released on Monday by Nasscom and A.T. Kearney, the smaller cities could capture 2-3 million IT and BPO jobs by 2018, if Government and industry take concrete measures for balanced growth, entailing development of infrastructure, improving curriculum in line with industry needs, and ensuring human resources development.

The study says that the current growth is focused on the seven leading cities (Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, National Capital Region and Pune) which together account for 85 percent of the IT sector employment and over 90 percent of the BPO employment in the country.

Apart from employment, these cities have realized significant gains in terms of improved visibility, consumption-led economic growth and improvement in social infrastructure. "We believe that over the next decade, share of the sectoral employment in the top seven locations will decline to around 60 75 percent with the total direct employment in these locations growing to 5-6 million. Absorbing this growth will pose a significant challenge to the physical and social infrastructure in these locations. At the same time, other locations have an opportunity to capture 2-3 million direct IT-BPO jobs - this is more than the total current employment in the sector," Som Mittal, President of Nasscom, said.

The analysis indicates that based on stages of development, the locations can be categorized into four groups - leaders, challengers, followers and aspirants. While 'challengers' includes cities such as Ahmedabad, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Coimbatore, Indore, Jaipur, Kochi and Lucknow, the 'followers' includes locations such as Aurangabad, Bhopal, Goa, Gwalior, Hubli-Dharwad, Kanpur, Mysore, and Nashik. The 'aspirant' category includes Allahabad, Dehradun, Durgapur, Gangtok, Guwahati, Ludhiana, Patna and Raipur.