Bangalore needs more than just urgent attention

IT’s a mess!
Bangalore needs more than just urgent attention

Editorial, The Financial Express

Around 400 years back, when the city of Bangalore was first conceived, it was predicted that the city would head towards doom if it stretched beyond four particular sites, each located diagonally opposite each other. As though an oracle had spoken — the city limits have stretched well beyond these four points and is now in a total mess. There’s no other word that defines Bangalore better. The city’s infrastructure has just not kept pace with the rapid pace of urbanisation. Once called the garden city, Bangalore is now a garbage city. And this is the same city which is supposedly the Silicon Valley of Asia. No surprise that IT bigwigs in the city are complaining that something needs to be done. But whose responsibility should this be?


Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys and also the head of the unique Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF), was very guarded in his response on the state of the city’s infrastructure. According to him, the deterioration has been rapid over the last one year. We would disagree with that. Deterioration started more than 10 years back. What is preposterous is the reaction of the political class. The state public works minister has put the onus of providing proper infrastructure back on the IT companies. Every honest taxpayer has a right to expect decent infrastructure, right from proper roads (one is not even talking of expressways), airports, public transport, power, to clean air and water. It is the job of the state administration to provide this. In fact, BATF was an organisation that provided government the right opportunities to change the city. Unfortunately, this has now become an unwanted ‘problem child’ for the government.

Bangalore is just one city, which on account of its IT bigwigs, is in the limelight. It’s much the same story in almost all urban townships. Be it Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad or any of the state capitals, development is lopsided and unplanned. City administrations are not planning for the future. Their plans cater for the present, at best. Therefore, by the time a plan is implemented, it is already outdated. Therein lies the problem of cities in our country.