Flying at last

Flying at last
The country’s first greenfield airport will give Bangalore a new lease of life

The Indian Express

Bangalore’s ambitions have been grounded by a lethal combination of political apathy and administrative lacunae, as last week’s Express series, ‘Bangalore Crumbling’, had brought home to readers. Here was a city functioning as a software hub of the world constrained by a crumbling infrastructure; its 21st century potential boxed in by the facilities that went out of date years ago. Nothing, perhaps, symbolised this lack of sync more eloquently than the failure of India’s first greenfield airport project to take off in Devanahalli, 11 years after the project was first conceived. Finally, at the end of the week, came the first glimmer of good tidings, with the Karnataka chief minister informing this newspaper that the airport project, which had teetered on the brink of oblivion, was on course.

Just one piece of statistics should underscore why such a facility has the potential to become the city’s life support system. In its first phase, the airport is estimated to cater to 4 million passengers, among whom will be 1 million international travellers. The frustrations of those wishing to visit Bangalore from cities like Seattle or San Jose have become the stuff of travellers’ tales. Infosys chairman,

N. R. Narayana Murthy, has time and again vented his frustration over the issue and has personally petitioned New Delhi on the need for direct international flights to Bangalore.

You don’t need to be a brain surgeon to realise that cities with Bangalore’s investment and growth potential require infrastructural support. Why does China display this inordinate appetite for airport expansion? Because it has realised years ago that there is nothing like a first-rate airport to act as a multiplier force for growth — both in terms of catering to it and in expanding it. By contrast we have a national leader and former prime minister like H.D. Deve Gowda arguing that such projects are “anti-poor”. Such ostrich-like stances on the part of the country’s decision makers have already extracted a heavy toll on the Indian economy and indeed on its ability to address the problems of the marginalised. Those in Karnataka’s hinterland have benefitted from the backward and forward linkages of Bangalore’s growth machine in more ways than Deve Gowda would care to acknowledge. Meanwhile, while India debates endlessly on the desirability of projects of this kind, smaller countries like Thailand and Malaysia have been busy building up world class infrastructure and garnering their benefits in terms of a better life for their citizens. We need to always remember that the ostrich is the one bird that does not fly.