Overflying Bangalore

Overflying Bangalore
In the name of development, the real issues are forgotten, rues PRAKASH BELAWADI
The Hindu

IN INTERNATIONAL travel, there is a certain hint of the pejorative when they say a flight will "overfly" some place. It will not stop there, it seems, because the place is not important enough. One wonders what people below a flyover feel, if you educated readers will forgive the flipping anagram.

Before readers could figure out what BTM means (Bannérghatta — or Béthmangalâ? — Tâvarékeré and Madivâla) comes the news that they are building a flyover from Bangalore to Electronics City, a new six-lane highway from the promised international airport to Electronics City and a new electronics city!

Flipping old Bangaloreans want to know when they will fill the potholes from Kammanahalli to Kengeri. Newspapers are running whose-road-is-worse competitions and the Government hears the whining czars of Electronics City above the datum din of rotting Bangalore. Have you been in sibling equations where you get beaten up because your sister screams louder in a spat? Forget who is biting whom.

Software what?

What exactly does software — software services, software products, software-enabled, and software-embedded, BPO, IPO, and POPO — all put together contribute to the city? Before you say ignoramus, you should know that somebody high up in a State-owned financial institution whispered that 71 per cent of all defaulters on loans in the State are software firms. So there. Somebody even higher up knows what these wealth-creating corporates contribute to the State coffers. "Negligible," he says.

Tantrums and threats

Figures really, because there are exemptions, subsidies, and tax holidays. There are apologies every time some software rajah throws a tantrum or a threat. Now there is action. They will build a gated city for a gated community, the members of which shall fly gaily over the grimy old city. It is a well-accepted axiom that the software "industry" grew largely because of government indifference, not its help. The companies became successful not because of Government, but in spite of it. The venal system didn't understand the merchandise. It was intangible, too ethereal for the system to exploit. So the Government left software alone. Wealth was created.

Riding piggyback


But the people who run Government haven't stopped trying to ride piggyback on the success. They bend backwards to please the software rajahs and want to bask in the billionaire glory. While we all acknowledge, readily, that we feel a sublime thrill akin to you know what when John Kerry mentions Bangalore in his election speech, it is time to take the wind out of the bag a bit and say it is increasingly annoying to live in the city and do the not-so-wealth-creating-but-necessary-nevertheless jobs of a city. There are those that will do the wondrous assignments of the world and the rest that must serve the interests of the flipping local community.

Feasibility study

So with some annoying questions: has anybody conducted a feasibility study for the new Electronics City that has been so awesomely announced? It is to be completed in "record time", they say; so has an environmental impact assessment been done? What about public hearings? We understand this is a central government plan, apparently a pet project of Minister Jagdish Tytler, but was BATF taken into confidence? Is there a BATF? Where is it?

There were rumours of plans of an IT corridor around the city, along the Outer Ring Road from Anekal, Electronics City, Bannerghatta, right up to Hebbal. BDA was to have conducted a feasibility study on it. The plan was to optimise the resources of land, real estate, roads, and other utilities to streamline development. Has this plan been shelved?

The Government has been promising to take industrialisation and development to other parts of the state. The software rajahs are whining. They have had enough. They have created enough wealth here, everybody agrees including international magazines, so shouldn't they be encouraged to do the favour to other parts of the State or country?

The most serious issue that Bangalore faces is not traffic and pollution, however gruesome they are. It is not even power. The city on the hill has a very critical problem with water. Bangalore is drawing nearly everything it can or should from the Cauvery and constitutes a real threat to agricultural users. In five years or so, the city will have taken every drop it could be entitled to from the river. Who will provide for the new Electronics City or whatever la-di-dah name they will think up? Sorry to be asking again, but what is in it for us?

Vulgar development

There is something vulgar about development planning when flyovers, townships, and utilities are built not for the whole, but for the particular. It was always a given thing that some people could never belong to Bangalore. This was not really the boondocks before the wealth creators came, though they might think it was while messing it up into a metro. This was not a wilderness to conquer. There was a thriving life of graciousness, culture, and cosmopolitanism. Ghettos and gated communities were not for this city. We should protest against these sudden plans.

Send your feedback to prakash@cfdbangalore.ac.in.