A GROWING NIGHTMARE
Rapid urbanisation and population growth have rendered the garden city into an urban sprawl, with the infrastructure unable to keep pace
Agiant 10-storey-tall bronze statue of Kempe Gowda, the illustrious founder of Bengaluru, is being installed at the entrance of the city’s swank airport. Back in AD 1537, Gowda, a feudatory of the mighty Vijayanagara empire, built a fort on a 2.4 square kilometre site atop an undulating plateau with a vision of creating a city of the future. Engaging two pairs of bullocks with ploughs, he got one set to walk in the north-south direction and the other in an east-west one. He then built roads along the furrows they created, dividing the city into four zones. Areas for housing, markets, government, and worship were clearly demarcated. The city won praise for its orderly planning from even his emperor, Achyutha Deva Raya. It came to be called Bengaluru, whose meaning ranges from the City of Boiled Beans to the City of White Quartz to the place of the bodyguards, depending on which theory you are partial to.
Cut to the year 2022 and the statue of Gowda stands blindfolded awaiting a formal unveiling, possibly in early November, by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. When the scaffolding is removed, Bengaluru’s founder may not like what he sees of the city he had planned so meticulously. For one, it stretches way, way beyond the fort Gowda built around it, a giant, sprawling megalopolis that continues to expand at an unwieldy pace. In the past decade alone, the city has grown four times in size and now covers a swathe 800 square kilometres in area, joining the league of the world’s fastest growing cities. Its population has almost tripled in the past two decades, from 5.1 million in 2001 to 14.3 million in 2021, making it the third largest metro in the country. It has overtaken Chennai, Kolkata and Hyderabad and has only Delhi and Mumbai as its superiors.
On the surface, though, Bengaluru appears to be a thriving, throbbing conurbation where start-ups
spring up like daisies every morning and grow into unicorns (having turnovers of $1 billion or more) by sundown. Or even decacorns, like Byju’s, within just a decade of being set up. Bengaluru is now in the race to be the infotech capital of the world, with its tech corridor, a glittering 17-km arc of glass and stainless steel skyscrapers, housing an estimated 400 of the Fortune 500 corporates. This dense concentration of the world’s top IT and banking firms generates $22 billion (Rs 1.8 lakh crore) per annum, accounting for a third of Bengaluru’s revenue and employing close to 1 million people. With migrants forming two-thirds of its population, more than just a melting pot of cultures, the ‘Multiple City’ has a myriad tongues, multiple origins, multi cuisines and cacophony of soundtracks and festivals, as an expert put it.
FROM SLEEPY CANTONMENT TO A CITY THAT DOESN’T SLEEP
Once a laidback pensioners’ paradise, the city now has an army of software development and business processing firms chasing the sun to get work done worldwide with their lights burning bright through the night. There are other distinctions, too, to commend the city.
It has the highest number of multinational R&D centres, accounting for a third of the 1,165 in the country. Hi-tech capital apart, Bengaluru is also acknowledged as India’s science, avionics, space, start-up and biotech capital. The joke is that with Bengaluru’s software enterprises running so many of the global computer installations, were the city to get nuked, the world would go back to the Stone Age.
With a per capita income of Rs 5.72 lakh, or four times the all-India average, Bengaluru is one of the most affluent cities in the country. Occupying just two per cent of Karnataka’s land area, it contributes a staggering 37 per cent to the Gross State Domestic Product. Yet its prosperity threatens to be the kiss of death for Bengaluru. It took just one major spell of rain in September to expose the city’s worst-kept secret—India’s most progressive city is regressing at warp speed and, if left unchecked, could see total collapse.
Among those who bore the brunt of nature’s fury was Gaurav Munjal, the CEO of Unacademy, the edtech giant, who lives in a posh colony of luxury villas close to Hi-tech City. On September 6, he, his family and his pet dog had to be rescued from their house after flood waters entered it. Uploading a video, Munjal tweeted: “Family and my Pet Albus has been evacuated on a Tractor from our society that’s now
submerged. Things are bad. Please take care.” The loss the flood caused to the Outer Ring Road tech corridor alone was estimated to be over Rs 225 crore. But the damage it did to the city’s reputation as the Mecca of Innovation was irreparable. Bangalored, a word that once described the city’s ascendancy over California’s Silicon Valley, has now taken on a whole new negative connotation of a city bursting at its seams with its cup of woes brimming over.
What is not brimming is drinking water supply, despite the recent floods, as the city faces a huge shortage. To quench the city’s thirst, the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) has to pump 1,450 million litres of water daily from the river Cauvery that flows 120 km away up a steep gradient as the city is located on a ridge. Its elevation of
3,000 feet is what gives Bengaluru the climate of a hill station but makes supplying water an expensive affair. The pumping costs alone are Rs 45 crore a month and while it costs the board Rs 28 per kilolitre (kl), it is sold at a starting rate of Rs 7 a kl (for domestic users). As a result of the heavy subsidy, the board faces an annual revenue deficit of Rs 1,300 crore. The city has a water supply shortfall of 650 million litres a day, or a third of the demand, leading to intermittent service and increased dependence on groundwater. There is a proposal to meet the city’s growing water needs from the Sharavati river 400 km away, but it has been stalled owing to strong protests on ecological grounds.
A CUP OF WOES BRIMMING OVER
Meanwhile, the rapid expansion of the city with scarcely a thought for transport and ease of mobility has led to nightmarish traffic jams on its arterial roads. The Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) has failed to provide a sufficient or efficient public transport system to ease commuting woes. The result is an explosion of private transport for commuting, with 10 million registered vehicles in 2021-22, the most in India after Delhi. That’s an irrational 1:1 ratio—one vehicle per adult citizen in the city. Worse, the roads are poorly maintained and marred by potholes. Congress legislator P.R. Ramesh sarcastically asked Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai recently in the legislative council
if he could identify even 1 kilometre of Bengaluru’s 11,000 kilometres of roads that did not have a pothole. Bommai promised a thorough audit of the roads. In 2019, the TomTom Traffic Index, which evaluates traffic services across the globe, rated Bengaluru as the world’s worst city in terms of traffic congestion, with people spending an extra 243 hours that year commuting.
Housing its burgeoning millions is another major worry. The boom saw an explosion of largely unplanned vertical and horizontal residential colonies. Rents too are soaring, with a two-bedroom house in Indiranagar now fetching Rs 1 lakh at the higher end, double of what it commanded prior to the pandemic. In addition, more than 400 slums have come up in random fashion, and they house almost a third of the city’s population. The total housing shortage is estimated to touch 2.56 million by 2031, with the economically weaker sections bearing the brunt of this crisis. A recent study based on 500 workers in Bengaluru found they lived in shared spaces, half of which were no more than covered sheds, and shared toilets or used public facilities.
Yet, amazingly, the Union ministry of housing and urban affairs (MoHUA) ranked Bengaluru as No. 1 among 49 cities with a million-plus population in its Ease of Living Index (EoLI) for 2020. Attribute it to Bengaluru’s consistently high score in terms of economic prowess. However, cut to municipal performance and sustainability development, and the city ranked 31 out of 51 cities in the MoHUA’s Municipal Performance Index (MIP) for the same year, faring poorly in key criteria such as services, technology, finance, urban planning and governance. NITI Aayog’s first Sustainable Development Index released in 2021 confirmed the trend: while Bengaluru was a frontrunner in providing jobs and ensuring economic growth, it stood 13th on sustainability issues.
FIVE REASONS THE CITY IS GOING TO SEED
What explains Bengaluru’s descent into chaos and decrepitude? The blame for the city’s boom and subsequent bust is wrongly pinned on its crown jewel, the IT or information technology sector. Tech czar N.R. Narayana Murthy, the founding chairman of Infosys, recalls the time he first visited Bengaluru in the early 1960s to see his sister. Forget vehicles, even humans were hard to find on its roads. By the mid-1980s, when Murthy shifted his nascent company from Pune to Bengaluru, the city had already undergone a radical transformation. It was a boom city long before Murthy and a dozen other pioneers spawned the IT miracle.
The first wave of the city’s growth came in the 1960s when public sector giants like HMT, BEL, ITI and BEML were set up to capitalise on Bengaluru’s clean air as well as its scientific and technological base. Then, with surplus power, the city’s planners threw open its doors to businesses from across the country in the Seventies. With industrialists in Bombay beset with union troubles and those in Calcutta harassed by the Naxal movement, they moved to Bangalore in droves. By 1983, when india today featured a cover story chronicling Bangalore’s boom, it was already among the fastest growing cities in the world. The entry of the IT sector at the turn of the century only accelerated that growth. The prosperity, though, came at a price, as the city’s infrastructure began heading for a total breakdown. If Bengaluru has become a textbook case for how to ruin a city, there are five major reasons other Indian metros and wannabe cities can learn from and avoid.
THE BLAME FOR BENGALURU’S WOES IS WRONGLY PINNED ON THE IT SECTOR. IT WAS A BOOM CITY LONG BEFORE MURTHY AND CO SPAWNED THE IT MIRACLE IN THE CITY
1. Multiple Agencies at Cross-purposes
Bengaluru has a maze of governmental, parastatal and autonomous bodies to govern and provide its citizens infrastructure and civic amenities, with no unified command to monitor, regulate and coordinate its growth (see Too Many Monitors). Foremost among them is the Bangalore Metropolitan Region Development Authority (BMRDA), which oversees the development of three districts—Bengaluru Urban and Rural and Ramanagara—totalling 8,000 sq. km, making it possibly the largest among India’s metropolitan regions. The BMRDA was formed to coordinate the activities of the various civic agencies in these districts, but lack of financial powers have rendered it a largely toothless body that cannot enforce its diktats.
Then, there is the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA), an autonomous body meant to prepare the master plan for the city and oversee its orderly growth. Shockingly, however, the city’s last master plan expired in 2015 and it has not got a new one even after seven years. The BDA had prepared a plan for 2015 to 2031, but the state’s urban development department (UDD), which the planning body reports to, summarily rejected it and asked for a revised plan incorporating the transport development framework prepared by the UDD’s directorate of urban land transport. Why it wasn’t incorporated in the first place is a telling example of how these agencies operate in silos.
Other examples of agencies working in isolation are the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), which oversees the city’s land transport, and the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation (BMRC). They are housed in the same office complex in Shantinagar but don’t work in coordination. The BMTC reports to the state’s transport ministry and operates independently of other civic agencies
in the city. The result: there is very little first- or lastmile connectivity for commuters to move seamlessly from bus to train and vice versa, to ease congestion and ensure convenience, forcing them instead to rely on autorickshaws and taxis to get to their destinations. One reason is that when the metro project, a joint venture between the central and state governments, was set up in 1994, it decided that much of the rails will be overground to save costs. That decision ruined some of the landmark avenues in the heart of the city, including the famed MG Road, now marred by monstrous concrete girders running down its middle. In the densely-packed city, much of the network runs parallel to arterial roads where buses also ply, defeating their very purpose.
This is also the reason implementation of the metro project has been slow, as land acquisition for overground rails is cumbersome and time-consuming. The metro finally began operations in 2011. It has so far completed just 56 km, with another 119.4 km to be completed by 2025. The cost so far: Rs 59,328 crore. Currently, the metro handles barely 10 per cent of the total commuting traffic of 4 million and though the BMTC boasts a fleet of 6,521 buses, commuters prefer their own vehicles because of poor connectivity. The city’s vehicle population grew by 3 million from 2014-15 to 2020-21; the BMTC did not add even a single bus in that time. As architect Naresh Narasimhan points out, “It costs Rs 340 crore
per km for a metro whereas it would have cost Rs 5 crore a km to make a dedicated lane for buses. We must get our priorities right. The word economy and ecology come from the same Greek root word ‘eco’—meaning home—and people forget they must be said in the same breath.”
2. An Unholy Nexus
The second major reason for the decline of the city is the arbitrary way in which the affairs of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), or the Greater Bengaluru Municipal Corporation, have been handled. The BBMP was set up in 2007 by the then H.D. Kumaraswamy government by merging the hundred wards of the erstwhile Bengaluru
Mahanagara Palike, seven city municipal councils, one town municipal council and 110 villages surrounding the city into a single administrative area. Almost overnight, Bengaluru’s municipal jurisdiction grew from 200 sq. km to 800 sq. km and the total number of wards increased from 100 to 198. With no accompanying planning to expand its administrative capabilities and inadequate funds to meet the demands placed by this fourfold expansion in territory, a senior state official in service then recalls, “Bengaluru became ungovernable with all of us firefighting for amenities rather than planning ahead. It led to ad hoc development, increased corruption and sent the city down the tube.”
The only one to benefit was the politician-businessman
builder nexus, which thrived. With almost 100 additional elected corporators and their lackeys, it meant more hands in the till. “It was meant to be a single window for the city’s development,” says an expert. “But it turned out to be just another window to pay more speed money.” With no proper zoning laws for the newly added wards, agricultural land was converted into revenue properties, resulting in an explosion of highrises, both in commercial and residential spaces in low-lying areas on the outskirts of the city. But even as posh colonies mushroomed in new areas, the infrastructure lagged, as roads remained narrow, the drainage poor, and garbage disposal too. So, while Bengaluru’s IT hubs boasted glittering buildings and plush campuses, open drains, narrow streets causing traffic jams, and uncleared garbage remained an eyesore. V. Ravichandar, honorary director of the Bangalore International Centre and a city evangelist who has been waging a losing battle to save it, terms it “private splendour amid public squalor”.
3. Greed versus Green
The recent floods, says Ravichandar, were a disaster waiting to happen since successive city administrators have messed with the natural flow of rainwater while sanctioning its expansion. Bengaluru’s topography holds the clue to why water management is key. The old city came up on a central ridge line that runs north to south. Rainwater falling east of this ridge drains into valleys, filling up the numerous interlinked man-made lakes downstream. This is where the city’s storm water drain (SWD) network came in—these primary canals, known locally as rajakaluves, were once natural rain-fed streams across which farmers built small bunds over time to arrest the flow of water and create lakes. When one lake filled up, water was let out downstream via sluice gates to the next lake.
The city administrators made their third big mistake when, to meet the demand for space for construction and roads, they allowed lakes to be breached regularly. The lakes, which once numbered a thousand-odd, are now reduced to a paltry 200 or so. Worse, the rajakaluves that channelised the storm water had buildings built over them. Bellandur, the tiny village from which Bengaluru’s best-known lake takes its name, is today a mass of buildings and shanties sitting cheek-by-jowl alongside business parks—a thriving ecosystem that provides everything from paying guest accommodation to shops and restaurants. Leo F. Saldanha, the coordinator of the non-profit Environment Support Group, which has been litigating for lake preservation for over two decades, says, “All these were natural agricultural wetlands. But while putting up buildings, planners should have ensured space for water to collect and interlinkages to lakes downstream if they overflowed. It was a very simple thing to do, but we ignored it and the citizens are paying the
price—as we all experienced in the recent floods.”
In a perceptive article, Rohini Nilekani, philanthropist and wife of Nandan Nilekani of Infosys and Aadhaar fame, wrote, ‘The recent Bengaluru floods washed up the dirty linen of mismanagement and corruption on the shores of a crumbling city infrastructure. As the elite of East Bengaluru painfully experienced, we cannot be consumers of good governance, we have to create it. If we point one finger at the government, are three fingers pointed back at ourselves? Have we built our sprawling campuses on flood plains? Like it or not, floods, pandemics and air pollution put everyone in the same boat, even if some of us are in the upper deck private cabins. We will have to row together to steer away from the rising waters. Life jackets are under the seat. But the oars are right on top.’
4. Criminal Neglect of Maintenance
The lack of repair and maintenance, especially of stormwater drains and solid waste management, are the fourth folly the city’s administrators are guilty of committing over the years. Funds to upgrade and remodel half of Bengaluru’s 850-odd km SWD network have been allocated over the past two decades, but progress has been inexplicably slow. In his budget this year, CM Bommai allocated Rs 1,500 crore to upgrade the remaining 400-odd km; following the heavy rains and inundation, he released a further Rs 300 crore for SWDs. With angry citizens demanding answers, Bommai told the assembly last month that tenders for these have been awarded. “But to start work, we must first clear buildings and encroachments that are in the way. That’s the situation in Bengaluru today,” he said, adding that it will take at least one and a half years to upgrade the SWDs. “But wherever there is an urgent need, we have started work.” Among these efforts has been the restoration of the arterial K-100 drain (see Narasimhan Citizenspeak).
Bommai, who heads the UDD that oversees the func
OVER 400 SLUMS HAVE COME UP ALL OVER BENGALURU, HOUSING ALMOST A THIRD OF ITS POPULATION. TOTAL HOUSING SHORTAGE IS ESTIMATED TO TOUCH 2.56 MILLION BY 2031
tioning of the BBMP apart from the BMRDA and the BDA, has also drawn flak for delaying the municipal polls to elect corporators and the mayor of the city. There have been no elections since 2020, as a new law passed that year by the assembly to expand the number of wards from 198 to 243 and to devolve more powers to the mayor is caught in a legal battle. Critics cite the delay as deliberate because Bengaluru is seen as the cash cow that generates an enormous amount of speed money or bribes to get clearances for licences to construct buildings quickly. With the assembly election due next year, the political class allegedly wants the ambiguity to persist in order to milk funds to fight the polls.
5. Bribe and Prejudice
This brings us to the fifth major reason for Bengaluru’s decline: rampant corruption in civic bodies to get sanctions as well as clearance for land use, building construction and completion certificates. Every party that has ruled the state in the past few decades has been guilty of looking the other way. T.V. Mohandas Pai, the city’s top angel investor, is blunt, “Everyone knows that the BBMP is a very corrupt organisation where posts are sold, people come there to make money for projects and there is no auditing, so nobody has been sacked. You can’t start a project, get a building licence and electricity sanction unless you bribe them. It’s getting worse by the year.” Last year, to Bommai’s acute embarrassment, one of the major contractors’ associations in the state wrote a letter to the prime minister alleging that the ministers and elected representatives demand up to 30 per cent of the tender amount to approve a contract in addition to the 5-6 per cent towards the release of the ‘Letter of Credit’ against pending bills. Bommai dismisses the charges, saying after taking charge in July 2021, he constituted a tender scrutiny committee headed by a retired judge to prevent malpractices. Interestingly, the 28 MLAs who represent Bengaluru are among the richest in the state as the declarations before the Election Commission have shown, with B.S. Suresh, a Congress MLA from Hebbal, boasting a net
worth of Rs 375 crore. Also, as a former senior official said, “The political instability in the state means it is very much an MLA-governed state.”
HOW TO SAVE BENGALURU FROM SELF-DESTRUCTION
What will it take for Bengaluru to get out of the collective hell-hole it finds itself in, as Ravichandar terms it? Can the city be saved? Yes, says Narayana Murthy. But with three caveats: that its administration be placed under the command of a CEO-like figure and all civic and infrastructure agencies report to him or her; the person chosen to head the unified command be someone of political stature (Murthy cites the example of Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel who cut their teeth in city politics and development before they became statesmen. In the UK, it was former British prime minister Boris Johnson’s performance as the mayor of London that catapulted him to the top post); and three, a portion of the enormous revenue that Bengaluru generates for the state be ploughed back into its development.
Others suggest that Bengaluru, like other major international cities, draw up a master plan with a 50-year vision, as Singapore did, and work towards it. Narasimhan disagrees, though. He argues that master plans for fastgrowing cities like Bengaluru are an outdated idea, because it is based on land use, which is a euphemism for real estate. “It’s like a colouring book,” he says. “Yellow means residential, blue means commercial, red means government and green means public pace. This is all motherhood and apple pie stuff.” Narasimhan says the rest of the world is abandoning such fossil fuel-era planning and instead repopulating the inner city because planners believe that urban density is better than urban spread. Narasimhan, therefore, wants a vision for the city that defines how air quality should be, the per capita water availability, the standards of mobility, the spaces for interactivity—criteria that define the quality of life a city hopes to offer rather than just buildings and roads, and then ensure these are implemented. London, for instance, decided that every single land transit vehicle, including cabs, metros and buses, be brought under a single organisation called Transport for London. It became so successful that people stopped using personal vehicles for office commutes, with many office complexes even abandoning parking spaces for vehicles.
The key, though, is time-bound implementation of civic infrastructure projects, with high-quality standards, something that Prashant Prakash, a serial entrepreneur and start-up investor, says is a major lacuna currently. Prakash argues that what the city administration lacks is the capacity to design and find solutions that are appropriate and contract them so that the work is done diligently rather than the suboptimal and substandard outcomes that have become the norm. Rather than rely on consultants for design and contractors for implementation of projects— neither of whom has much skin in the long-term game—he believes the government should leverage the competence of the vibrant private sector and form public-private partnerships to resolve civic amenity issues. He cites the example of Bengaluru Solid Waste Management Limited (BSWML), an autonomous body that was formed recently to handle the city’s garbage. Administratively and financially independent, it will be free to enter into tie-ups to meet its goals.
What about developing a twin city for Bengaluru that can decongest the existing one? Many experts, including Ravichandar, are enthused by the idea and believe the Bangalore International Airport area, which covers 437 sq. km, could be developed into an alternative magnet if planned well. But real estate tycoon Irfan Razack, chairman of the Prestige Group, is against any move that detracts focus from Bengaluru and its collapsing infrastucture. “Bangalore is having a heart attack,” he says. “It won’t help the city if you operate on another body.” Bommai believes the solution lies in developing satellite towns around the city and connecting them to Bengaluru with high-speed circular rail facilities. The central government has stepped in and sanctioned Rs 15,700 crore to boost the city’s suburban rail network, a project PM Modi inaugurated and which he promised will be completed in 40 months and not 40 years. In addition, Bommai has announced that work will begin on the 74-km, eight-lane Peripheral Ring Road (PRR), a project estimated to cost Rs 15,000 crore. The recent floods and the damage they caused is a wake-up call for Bengaluru and gives Bommai and Co the opportunity to take tough decisions that can pull Bengaluru out of the current morass. This includes holding elections for the BBMP and devolving management to elected corporators, who will be accountable to the citizens. What is needed is speedy, concerted action to rescue India’s city of the future from turning into a fossil of past follies. ■
AMONG THE SUGGESTIONS TO SAVE BENGALURU IS GETTING IT A CEO-LIKE FIGURE WHOM ALL AGENCIES CAN REPORT TO, AND TO PLOUGH BACK SOME OF ITS REVENUE INTO ITS DEVELOPMENT