Water protests in tech hub expose India growing pains
Bangalore shut down after violent protests
BANGALORE: Oracle employees were at work on Monday when protesters entered their nine-storey building in India’s technology hub, Bangalore, and asked them to leave in support of demonstrations that had erupted across the city over a water dispute. By early afternoon, one of the US software giant’s biggest overseas offices had been evacuated, two employees there told Reuters, as had the Bangalore premises of dozens of multinationals and Indian firms that stayed shut on Tuesday to ensure staff safety. A spokeswoman for Oracle in India said no one was available to comment on the incident.
Two 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-year-old 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. Thomson Reuters , the parent company of Reuters News, has more than 4,500 staff in Bangalore. The company said a significant number of its employees in the city had worked remotely on Tuesday, while a small core group worked from its offices.
‘I Felt Unsafe’
Bangalore businesses have faced four days of 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 $97 billion in information technology exports. The head of Indian drugmaker Biocon jokingly referred to Bangalore as “Bandhaluru”, using the Hindi word “Bandh” for closed. Employees of two large Indian companies told Reuters their buses were stopped and rocked by protesters, who asked them to join the demonstrations.
Cars and trucks registered in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu were smashed and set on fire. A 22-year-old IT worker, who declined to be identified, said she saw a police van in flames. “For the first time, I felt unsafe in a city I love so much,” said Prejin Joe, who runs a tech startup in Bangalore and is originally from another southern state, Kerala. Despite such experiences, and images of burning buses and trucks broadcast by Indian TV news channels, employers said the spasm of violence, in which two people were killed, had done no major damage to the appeal of the southern city. Several big employers contacted by Reuters said the violence had not changed their view of the city as an attractive place to be based. None was prepared to be quoted. Yet major infrastructure problems like congestion and poor water management, if not adequately addressed, may over time blunt Bangalore’s edge over other dynamic commercial centers in India and beyond. From a sleepy retirement center known as “Garden City” in the 1990s, Bangalore, or Bangalore, has grown to become a sprawling metropolis of 10 million that is home to major offices of firms such as Amazon.com, Dell and local giant Wipro.