Starting November 1, Karnataka formation day, the Karnataka Rakshana Vedike (KRV) has been sending its activists to the gates of information technology companies in Bengaluru asking to inspect their hiring data. Specifically, the memorandum submitted to each company asks how many locals it has on its rolls and their proportion in the total headcount.

The KRV believes that IT companies operating in Karnataka benefit from the State’s infrastructure, resources, and taxpayer-funded incentives; so, it is expected of them to accommodate local talent in good measure. However, corporate companies—not just in Bengaluru but elsewhere as well—get nervous when activists turn up at their premises asking such questions; indeed, Karnataka Chief Minister DK Shivakumar has appealed to KRV not to discomfit them with data demands. The IT industry is already vexed with the conditions in Bengaluru and the uncomfortable questions may just nudge them to leave.

However, discounting the menacing intent, if any, it’s a legitimate question to ask: what proportion of the IT workforce in Bengaluru is local? Jobs-for-locals activists believe that the incentives given to IT companies at tax-payer expense must yield an employment payoff to the community and that government policies toward the IT sector must explicitly be designed for such a payoff.

When a State waives taxes, provides cheap land, or builds high-end infrastructure specifically for tech parks, it does so with an eye on a return on investment in the form of local employment. In Karnataka, tech companies receive taxpayer-backed concessions such as 100% exemption from stamp duty on property deeds, waiver of the land conversion fee (for turning agricultural land into tech parks), property tax reimbursement for three years, subsidies and concessions on utilities, labour law exemptions and other preferential treatments.

So where is the data proving that the IT policy’s employment objectives are being achieved? The truth is that there is no official, publicly accessible data documenting the exact percentage of IT sector jobs held by locals. Industry bodies like NASSCOM track only macro-level data such as total employment, gender diversity and skill availability rather than socioeconomic demographics. The IT industry as a whole orientates itself to global competitiveness; regional representation is not its main concern. They are exempt from labour laws requiring industries to track metrics on employee origin and linguistic background. Bengaluru’s IT sector, including startups, is said to have roughly 2.5 million employees. As a consuming and tax-paying population, they are a significant part of the urban landscape. However, data on their socioeconomic distribution, including native State and language, remains anecdotal.

This lack of definitive data on local employment is precisely what has given scope for jobs-for-locals agitations and, in response, half-baked legislations in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Haryana. AP and Karnataka drafted bills with provisions such as 50% local quota in management roles and 75% generic quota for locals but both came a cropper in the courts or in the consultations stage on account of inadequate data. The data gap made it easy for the IT industry to oppose them. NASSCOM argued that stipulating rigid percentages without a data-backed study could lead to industry disruption. The situation calls for gathering hard data before making sound policy based on it. Suppositions will only fuel suspicions on either side.