Zoho continues to invest in rural India with plans for new tech hubs in Tirunelveli, Madurai and Uttar Pradesh

Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu

SaaS major Zoho Corporation, which established a technology hub in the rural town of Tenkasi in 2011, creating products for the international market, intends to launch additional tech hubs in the rural areas of Tirunelveli and Madurai in Tamil Nadu, as well as in Uttar Pradesh.

"Rural development is there but I’m moving myself in the hottest growth market. And within India, the rural areas are developing faster and growth will spread across," Sridhar Vembu, cofounder and CEO, said during a press conference in Tenkasi on April 3.

The location for the Uttar Pradesh tech hub is currently being finalised.

"We are visiting UP often and in the next two months we will decide the place. It will mostly be in central or eastern Uttar Pradesh and not in Noida," Vembu said.

Zoho is also expanding its current facility, Kalaivani Kalvi Maiyam, which was established during the pandemic to educate young children from villages in and around Tenkasi, the firm said in a media statement.

Zoho plans to hire approximately 1,300 employees for its upcoming office, currently being built in the Kappalur area of Madurai.

Vembu moved from Silicon Valley to a village in Tamil Nadu's Tenkasi district in November 2019, with the goal of empowering rural communities, and decided to use a hub-and-spoke office model to cater to a distributed workforce.

The hub offices can accommodate 1,000 or more employees, whereas the spoke offices can accommodate up to 100 employees. Each hub office will eventually have a few spoke offices associated with it for infrastructure support and team collaboration.

The company currently has five hub offices in India, including ones in Chennai, Tenkasi, and Renigunta, as well as around 30 spoke offices. Nearly 2,000 employees work out of Zoho's hub and spoke offices in villages and Tier 2/3 towns, with about 1000 hired locally, the firm said.

"As part of their rural empowerment efforts, the spoke offices periodically conduct free career awareness sessions in surrounding colleges, as well as upskilling workshops and incubation programmes to identify and hire talented local youth," the firm said.