Bangalore to be bangalored to Hyderabad

Upwardly mobile
By moving on plans for an international airport at Hyderabad, AP displays its savvy

Shekhar Gupta, Editor-in-Chief, The Indian Express

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs has cleared Hyderabad’s plans for an international airport, and a formal pact is likely to be signed next week between the government and the consortium that will build it. This is good news. After an avalanche of dismal despatches from Bangalore, it is confirmation that Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy is not inclined to project his landslide electoral victory on his predecessor’s legacy. During Chandrababu Naidu’s reign, Hyderabad made strident efforts to become an IT hub and upgrade its urban infrastructure. Airports are considered key junctions of economic activity. They energise the cities they service; but they also bring vast swathes of the hinterland into greater economic loops. An airport is a city’s greeting card in a globalised world.

What a pity that Reddy’s fellow Congressman, Karnataka Chief Minister Dharam Singh, found it difficult to understand this simple fact. That benefits can be reaped from programmes initiated by a predecessor, never mind that he may have been defeated at the hustings. That junking the loser’s initiatives blindly amounts to petty politics, not mature governance. AP and Karnataka make for an interesting comparison in the assembly elections they both staged this summer. In both states the capital city has made forceful claims for a slice of the IT and BPO business. In both states, the ruling chief minister lost his post — in AP to the leader of a rival political party, but in Karnataka to a party colleague. This is what casts the deliberate attempt by Dharam Singh, in tandem with coalitional ally H.D. Deve Gowda, to spike Bangalore initiatives in such a pathetic light. It is irrelevant whether Singh and Gowda are driven by animus against former chief minister, S.M. Krishna — or whether they are cynically addressing rural Karnataka’s aspirations of keeping pace with Bangalore’s booming economy by simply smothering the latter. The point is that since they took power, its infrastructure was allowed to deteriorate.

Recently, a new verb has been coined. To be “Bangalored” is to have lost one’s job in assorted parts of the world to a person based in India leveraging better skills and costs. Under Karnataka’s ruling dispensation, the meaning could change. To be Bangalored could now mean wilfully losing one’s competitive advantage. If Hyderabad plays it right it could just gatecrash Bangalore’s cyber party.