Oh Bangalore!

Oh Bangalore!
T N Ninan, Editor, Business Standard

There seems to be no let-up in protests by IT companies in Bangalore over the quality of the city’s infrastructure.

The Bangalore Forum for Information Technology, a group of companies focused on products and technology development, has added its voice to those raised earlier by declaring that it will not attend the coming Bangalore IT.Com to register its protest.

IT.Com is the premier annual event through which Karnataka and its capital city seek to showcase themselves to the rest of the world as a preferred destination for IT companies.

It seems that the well known companies which make up the forum, like Philips, Texas Instruments, and Sasken, have decided that the time to make polite noises is over.

Their frustration is understandable as they are not run-of-the-mill IT services companies that can quickly recruit and train large numbers of freshers who can be sourced anywhere.

They are technology companies needing mostly skilled manpower, which is best available in Bangalore. Hence their hectoring and cajoling of the state government to make it change its ways.

But disaffection over the city’s infrastructure is not confined to the technology companies. Both formal surveys and affirmations by newcomers indicate that traffic jams and the level of automobile pollution in the city are close to unbearable.

The power situation is also far from satisfactory. On top of this and other physical inconveniences, the latest state budget has loaded additional taxes on the sale of both software and hardware. Almost overnight, it seems as though Karnataka, till now a very IT-friendly state, has turned almost IT-unfriendly.

The deterioration in the infrastructure has been marked since the advent of the new Congress-Janata Dal(S) government in May. The construction of several flyovers, undertaken in the first place to ease traffic conditions, has been grossly delayed.

Particularly appalling is the state of Banerghatta Road, housing the IIM and a host of well known IT companies.

This is in sharp contrast to what happened to Bangalore through the five-year stint of the S M Krishna government. It saw the emergence of a unique public-private partnership under the initiative of the Bangalore Agenda Task Force.

Yearly opinion surveys organised by a leading NGO, Public Affairs Centre, revealed that here was a city that was not only improving the quality of life for its citizens, the citizens themselves were readily acknowledging it.

Undoubtedly Bangalore is the victim of its own success. It is unable to cope with the pace of growth set for it. New high-quality jobs are adding rapidly to numbers and stretching resources to the limit.

The change is that a government that does not seem to care overmuch has replaced one that was trying to rise to the occasion. If this does not change, IT and R&D investments will seek out pastures elsewhere—in the country and outside.

A string of high-powered delegations has been coming to Bangalore from different states seeking IT investment. And they are delivering single-window clearance whereas Bangalore is unable to procure the land which even a leader with local roots like Infosys seeks.

If things do not change soon, fresh IT investment in India could begin to bypass the city.