It’s 2 am and the roadside ‘night tiffin’ stall is crowded with students. There is an endless flow of piping hot idlis and dosas, groups of students come and go and the street remains alive and buzzing till 4 am. All of them are software students, studying late into the night, working on Linux and Oracle.

This street in Hyderabad is a software training hub that has no parallel in India, and where about 50,000 non-engineering students nurse hopes of punching the right keys to get into the software industry. Welcome to Ameerpet, Hyderabad’s ‘Knowledge Valley’ where over 300 small and big software training institutes operate in a half square-km area.

Ameerpet is a one-stop street for all those who could not become software engineers but wanted to become software professionals. The craze to break into the software industry has spawned so many training institutes that transformed a sleepy middle-class neighbourhood into a centre for software training.

Hari Krishna, a director with Prolinc Solutions, says that the institutes started coming up in 2003 when the IT boom had just started. “There are 300-350 training institutes here in this small area,” he says.

The institutes offer every conceivable course that is useful in the software industry. From 10 to 600 students per batch, these institutes try to keep fees for each course as less as possible. At any given point of time, there are at least 50,000 students in the Ameerpet area, going into or coming out of the institutes or simply looking around for the right place to do the right course.

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