In India?s silicon capital, Kerala is on a hardsell mission. The state that?s striving to give itself an image makeover wants to grab its share of the spillover from Bangalore?s IT sector by wooing companies into swanky IT parks with the promise of lower costs, a talent pool and above all, unperturbed business.

?The most often quoted concern about labour unrest is, thankfully, a thing of the past. I assure you there is no reason to worry on account of labour in Kerala,? chief minister Oommen Chandy told investors at a business meet in Bangalore on Saturday, which was part of the campaign to promote the ?Emerging Kerala? investors? meet slated for September in Kochi. Besides IT, the state is banking on upcoming mega infrastructure projects such as a 600-km, high-speed rail corridor running through the state, a natural gas pipeline and mono-rail projects in smaller cities to drum up investor interest.

India?s top IT companies such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro ventured into Kerala in a small way years ago and are now in the process of expanding their presence at the IT parks in Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram. These two parks together seat about 60,000 people in addition to nearly 1,00,000 IT employees in independent locations, says Gigo Joseph, CEO of Infopark Kochi, which was set up in 2004 and hosts over 100 companies. Its exports were R1,200 crore last fiscal, posting a growth of 50% over the previous year.

?We are still a tier-two destination, but we are among the top of the tier-two,? says Joseph. ?Probably in the next two-three years, if people say they need to get out of Bangalore or plan their next phase of growth, the first location they would be looking at is us.?

Kerala is eyeing software exports of $15 billion by 2020 or roughly 5% of India?s software exports, and create about six lakh jobs over the same period. In contrast, Karnataka, whose IT exports are about $25 billion currently, has set itself an ambitious target of $70 billion by 2020 and two million jobs in the IT/ITES sector as against eight lakh jobs at present.

?At the national level, our percentage is small. We are nowhere near Karnataka or Tamil Nadu or Andhra Pradesh, but we are growing. The most important thing is there has been tremendous interest in the last one year,? says G Vijaya Raghavan, member of Kerala?s Planning Board. ?I don?t think the growth has been slow. The big difference here is that companies that started out with 20 people today have over 2,000 people.?

A recent survey found at least 15-20% of the middle management level employees were locals who had returned to the state after working elsewhere. Still, investors aren?t fully convinced.

?It?s difficult to attract talent, but it sounds like the government is trying to do something about it. We are bringing the demand, can they meet the supply? That?s the big question,? says Chintu Ramchandran, managing partner and CEO-India of Capco, a global business and technology consultancy focused on the financial services industry.

Ramchandran says his company is currently considering a 4,000-seat centre in Kerala to serve a local client.