The first heir gets a taste of all that is good and bad with Bangalore.

Lessons For A PM-in-the-making
The first heir gets a taste of all that is good and bad with Bangalore.
Business Today

Caught in a traffic jam on the road to Electronics city in Bangalore, with no pilot car to clear the way ahead, Rahul Gandhi must have had the point about India's Silicon Alley's crumbling infrastructure driven home to him (he was late for his meeting at Infosys by around 20 minutes, courtesy the gridlock). Gandhi was in Bangalore for two days in the third week of October to get a feel of India's it and biotech sectors and understand the strides Bangalore had made in urban governance (which have since been all but unmade by Karnataka's new government).

On Day 1, Gandhi visited the campuses of GE (the John F. Welch Centre), Infosys and Biocon. On Day 2, he visited those of ISRO, Wipro and Dodabalapur, a suburb some 50 km from Bangalore, to see Karnataka's famed computerised land records project, Bhoomi, in action. "He wanted to see how Bhoomi works and was impressed by it," says a senior bureaucrat closely associated with the project. Gandhi is also believed to have expressed a desire to reproduce the project in his constituency, Amethi.

Gandhi hosted a dinner for 15 of Bangalore's CEOs and received a laundry list of complaints (about what ails the city) from them. "We pointed out that Bangalore was competing for investment not just from other cities, but from other countries such as China," says one of the CEOs present. Although the young politico repeatedly made a point about being just an mp and "passing on the suggestions (to the right people)", the people he met are hoping that his visit, and the fact that he chose to have dinner with former Chief Minister S.M. Krishna (and not current one Dharam Singh), will shame the state government into some action.