When farmlands turned into IT skyscrapers

When farmlands turned into IT skyscrapers

Times of India

Bangalore: Sarjapur Road is proud. It has put Bangalore on the global map with IT companies queuing up to set shop in this area. Posh residential complexes make the area a prestigious locale, an address one would be proud to possess.

The four liquor shops and several beedi stalls that cover the Sarjapur Road stretch have a story to tell — the magic that converted farmlands into IT skyscrapers.

“After the take over of farmlands by KIADB for IT companies, business in the liquor shops have gone up almost 20 times. Landlords have been reduced to mere lords, who go to wine shops and sit in its dark corridors talking about million-dollar joint ventures that IT companies enter into on the lands that once were their own,’’ said B.V. Ramachandra Reddy, former MLA of Sarjapur Road.

The long-forgotten smell of the first rain on earth has been replaced by the obnoxious odour of arrack and beedi fumes that drift on endlessly from house to house. “Life has changed. Earlier, I used to look at the skies during summer waiting anxiously for the rain,’’ said a farmer, who sold off his land to a prominent IT firm. Today, his heaven is no more the blue sky — rain or shine doesn’t matter to him anymore.

It is difficult to encapsulate. It is about the after-effects of losing all the security that one possessed. It could be hardly imperceptible on the surface.

Some feel it is a wreckage of everything, the past, the present and the tomorrow. The 2,000 acres of farmland in Bellandur village, where stands Bangalore’s Silicon Valley, is no more as green as they were some years ago. Left is shards from acts that changed the lives of farmer families who still lives on the Sarjapur Road.

“Some farmers moved to Hosur in Tamil Nadu and bought about 150 to 200 acres there. Some others moved to Malur in Kolar district. The farmers staying here still are in misery. Land was their biggest security.

When the land passed on to IT hands so did the poultry to butchers’ shops as there were no grazing land available. That affected the income, which usually came from the dairy business. The illiterate farmer doesn’t know where to turn to. It’s killing them,’’ adds Reddy.

Behind the small stretch of Sarjapur Road are several hundred stories of success and failure. The stretch reminds us that the world is a stranger and more unfathomable the more closely one looks.