Bangalore's blues

Bangalore's blues
T N Ninan, Editor, Business Standard

The Gartner report on the attractiveness of various Indian cities as hosts for outsourced IT work confirms what is already widely believed —Bangalore is rapidly going downhill and Chennai and Hyderabad pose a serious challenge to its and Mumbai’s pre-eminence.

As if to underline the message contained in the survey, the former Prime Minister and senior Karnataka politician H D Deve Gowda has flatly denied that there is anything wrong with Bangalore’s infrastructure.

Bangalore’s decline is nevertheless very real and not unexpected, and unfortunately it will probably continue to go downhill as there is little realisation among the people who matter that there is a problem in the first place.

Mr Deve Gowda’s opinion is in that typical of the state of denial in some circles, and his opinion does matter because as the supreme leader of the Congress’s equal coalition partner, the Janata Dal(S), he has a substantial say in the way Karnataka is run.

This failure, or unwillingness, to acknowledge that there is something wrong with Bangalore’s infrastructure is of a piece with some other postures that the JD(S) has recently adopted.

Its representatives have at the eleventh hour sought to stall the clearance of the new Bangalore international airport by claiming that they want to thoroughly re-examine the actions of the earlier government concerning the project, as they smell kickbacks.

None other than the Infosys chief, N R Narayana Murthy, heads the board of Bangalore International Airport Ltd, which is widely seen to have conducted its business in a transparent and internationally acceptable manner.

Political observers feel that one of Mr Deve Gowda’s personal agendas is to undermine the achievements of his arch rival, former chief minister S M Krishna.

The manner in which Bangalore’s pre-eminence is being threatened holds lessons for all leading Indian cities and their town planners. If a global brand like Bangalore can fall from grace in a few months, no city can afford to rest on its laurels even for a day.

This is because of two reasons. First, offshored IT work is destination agnostic and will go wherever the competitive advantage lies. It can be anywhere from Ottawa to Budapest to Hanoi.

Secondly, there is now keen competition among cities across the globe to attract such business in a way which was not known earlier. So a city has only to blink for another to take away its jobs.

This is good news for the residents of cities, particularly those in developing countries, who have had to bear with poor urban facilities in their quest for better incomes.

Those who run these cities may now end up giving their residents a better deal in their attempts to attract offshored IT work. The greatest example of this turnaround is Kolkata, long written off but now back in the fray, driven by the desire to get a share of the IT cake.

Bangalore, which has a strong NGO presence, has to figure out how it can tackle the state of denial of its political masters.