Technology hub in turmoil Cheap inhaler barrier to smog
Deadly protests over water have laid bare the growing pains of one of India’s wealthiest cities.
Oracle employees were at work this week when protesters entered their nine-storey building in India’s technology hub, Bengaluru, also known as Bangalore, and asked them to leave in support of demonstrations that had erupted across the city over a water dispute.
Within minutes, one of the American software giant’s biggest overseas offices had been evacuated, as had the Bengaluru premises of dozens of multinationals and Indian firms.
A spokeswoman for Oracle in India said no-one was available to comment on the incident.
Several days of violence, in which protesters torched buses and clashed with riot police after a court ordered Karnataka state to share water from a river with another region, have exposed the growing pains of the dynamic technology hub’s chaotic boom.
‘‘They come and live here, which means our resources are being used by them. Tomorrow, if there is no water in the city, will they have an office here?’’ said 30-yearold local activist Keerthi Shankaraghatta, who led a group that staged peaceful calls to shut down several offices during the protests.
Videos posted on his Facebook page show employees from companies including Accenture and ICICI Bank being escorted out of their offices. ICICI declined to comment. Accenture did not respond to a request for comment.
Bengaluru businesses have faced disruption this month after the water protests and an unrelated strike, hitting operations in a city that accounts for a significant chunk of India’s US$97 billion in information technology exports.
The head of Indian drugmaker Biocon jokingly referred to Bengaluru as ‘‘Bandhaluru’’, using the Hindi word ‘‘bandh’’ for closed.
‘‘For the first time, I felt unsafe in a city I love so much,’’ says Prejin Joe, who runs a tech startup in Bengaluru.
Despite such experiences, and images of burning buses and trucks broadcast by Indian TV, employers said the spasm of violence, in which two people were killed, had not changed their view of the city as an attractive place to be based.
Yet major infrastructure problems like congestion and poor water management, if not adequately addressed, may over time blunt Bengaluru’s edge over other dynamic commercial centres in India and beyond.
From a sleepy retirement centre known as ‘‘Garden City’’ in the 1990s, Bengaluru has grown to
Prejin Joe, tech startup manager
For the first time, I felt unsafe in a city I love so much. become a sprawling metropolis of 10 million that is home to major offices of firms such as Amazon, Dell, and local giant Wipro.
To some, Bengaluru’s rise mirrors India’s economic progress over the past two decades, with business parks staffed with thousands of young, English-speaking graduates lured by the city’s cosmopolitan feel and well-paid office jobs.
But the growth has come at a cost. Streets are gridlocked, property prices have jumped, and lakes and open spaces have been concreted over. Many locals like Shankaraghatta are angry at the pressure new inhabitants put on resources.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has grand designs to build 100 futuristic ‘‘smart’’ cities that promise a hygienic, networked life for residents, but India’s existing urban spaces lack efficient public transport and sanitation.
In the southern city of Chennai, poor urban planning and rampant ‘‘encroachment’’ by property developers were blamed for exacerbating deadly floods last December.
With India’s cities forecast to absorb 400 million more people within a generation, experts worry that the hassles of doing business could eventually outweigh the cost advantages that have brought so many companies to Bengaluru. Cities like Hyderabad, nearly 600 kilometres to the north, are rushing to offer tax incentives and tout newer infrastructure to lure big employers away from crowded Bengaluru. Facebook, Uber and Google have large offices in Hyderabad.
But for now the advantages Bengaluru enjoys, with its unrivalled pool of skilled software engineers and swanky business parks, make it the city of choice for most large firms.
Companies leased more than 650,000 square metres of top-grade office space in Bengaluru in the first nine months of 2015, double 2013 levels and more than any other Indian city, according to property consultancy Cushman and Wakefield.
‘‘What has happened has been blown out of proportion. Bengaluru’s mojo has not gone,’’ said Shailesh Pathak, executive director at Bhartiya Group, which runs an integrated residential, business and commercial township in the city. An inhaler that protects the lungs against air pollution has been developed by scientists and could help the many millions of people affected by toxic air to avoid its worst effects.
The inhaler delivers a molecule, first found in bacteria in the Egyptian desert, which stabilises water on the surface of the lung cells to form a protective layer. It is expected to be available as an inexpensive, over-the-counter product.
Outdoor air pollution kills more than 3 million people a year and it has long been linked to lung and heart disease and strokes. But research is also uncovering new impacts on health, including degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, mental illness and, this week, diabetes.
The new inhaler has been developed by German medical devices company Bitop and is based on a molecule called ectoine, discovered in the 1980s in a desert bacterium which uses the compound to conserve water in 60 degrees Celsius heat.
‘‘It is quite an inert molecule that does one main thing, which is bind water, which stabilises cell membrane tissues against physical or chemical damage,’’ said Dr Andreas Bilstein, at Bitop.
When inhaled, this helps prevent the damage caused by air pollution particles.
Ectoine does not interact with cell receptors, so it is classed as a medical device rather than a drug. This means large clinical trials are not required for official approval and the inhaler could be on sale soon, at an estimated cost of £17 ($NZ) a month, after Bitop selects a marketing partner.
The protective effect of ectoine was discovered by Prof Jean Krutmann and colleagues at the Leibniz Research Institute for Environmental Medicine, while investigating whether the molecule could protect skin against sun damage. Bitop funded a series of studies, now published in prominent scientific journals .
Dr Richard Russell, a consultant respiratory physician in the NHS and medical adviser to the British Lung Foundation, who was not involved in the research, said the inhaler was both credible and promising: ‘‘Ectoine is a beautifully elegant molecule and it clearly works by helping water to stabilise, giving you a film of water in times of stress.’’
Russell said it might also be useful for the treatment of asthma and other lung diseases, not only prevention.
‘‘It could potentially do so much more. It is actually quite exciting and there is clearly a lot more to come from this story.’’