‘Bangalore is dead. I have lost all hope for it’

HORROR CITY
- ‘Bangalore is dead. I have lost all hope for it’
The Telegraph

The Garden City is choking on its own success. Bad roads, high pollution, power cuts and reckless construction are the flip side of life in a city that is home to 1,300 IT companies and seven million people. Bangalore’s denizens are now writing its epitaph, reports Varuna Verma
Caught in a jam: Traffic snarls are rampant. The number of vehicles on Bangalore’s roads is going up by 50 per cent per annum, compared with Delhi’s 10-12 per cent since 2000

Samuel Paul was mentally geared up to face the fury of road-users when he planned a pro-test rally on a busy Bangalore road during the morning rush hour. As expected, car after car pulled up near the protestors to find out what was happening.

Then the unexpected happened. Paul’s protest got a unanimous thumbs-up from motorists. He collected 1,500 signatures from road users alone. What’s more, doctors from the nearby Manipal Hospital, homemakers and school children formed an impromptu human chain. “All of Bangalore seemed to have poured on to Airport Road,” says Paul, chairman, Public Affairs Centre (PAC), a city-based non-governmental organisation.

The protest clearly touched a personal chord. The PAC’s demonstration in June this year was to protest against the long delay in the completion of a flyover on Airport Road, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city. The flyover was scheduled to be ready in early 2004. Work stopped half-way through its construction. With rusted iron pillars occupying three-fourths of the road space, traffic snarls are rampant on the road. “Going to office is a nightmare. I keep a 40-minute buffer zone,” says an Intel employee, whose office is on Airport Road.

Airport Road can be called Bangalore’s showpiece road in many ways. With big software firms located on both sides, it is a visitor’s first impression of India’s Silicon Valley.

It also offers a peek into routine life on Bangalore’s roads. Traffic crawls during rush hours. Water logging around the flyover’s rusted pillars is routine during the rains. Head down Airport Road towards the swanky International Technology Park Limited (ITPL) — the heart of Bangalore’s knowledge economy — and the potholes and broken tarmac ensure a free roller-coaster ride.

Going downhill

In fact, on Friday, Bangalore’s premier IT showcase event — IT.IN, which is slated for November — hit another roadblock. The Bangalore Chamber of Industry and Commerce (BCIC) announced that it would boycott the event. The BCIC has over 400 members, including 35 IT and ITeS companies. Key members of the BCIC are Infosys, Wipro, Sasken Communications, MphasiS and Convergence Communications. All these companies will be conspicuous by their absence at the event. The reasons cited by the BCIC for boycott are traffic bottlenecks, power shortage and poor infrastructure at the airport.

Bangalore is choking on its own success. Bad roads, high pollution, power cuts, growing garbage, dying lakes and reckless construction are the flip side of life in a city that is home to 1,300 IT companies and seven million people. Ten years ago it was the city of gardens everybody wanted to move in to. In 2005, Bangalore’s denizens are writing its epitaph.

“Bangalore is a dead city. I have lost all hope for it,” says T. V. Ramachandra, who teaches at the Centre for Ecological Studies, Indian Institute of Science (IISc).

Ramachandra says he dreads stepping out of the IISc campus. “The noise, smoke and crowds come as a shock to me each time,” says the professor, who grew up in a Bangalore of tree-lined streets and a salubrious climate. “Being a pensioners’ city, Bangalore lived in a content, laid-back time warp,” remembers Ramachandra.

In 1984, US-based software firm Texas Instruments picked Bangalore to set up its offshore development firm. That set the software ball rolling. Bangalore’s good weather, rich talent pool and investor-friendly government — Karnataka was the first state to announce an IT policy in 1997 — became a big draw for IT multinationals looking at India as an outsourcing destination.

In a little over a decade, the peaceful haven metamorphosed into a fast-moving programmer’s paradise. And before you knew it, breakneck growth had become the bane of Bangalore. “The rapid growth took everyone unawares, especially the government,” says Bangalore-based urban planner Swati Ramanathan, who has written a white paper for the University of California at Berkeley on the city.

There is a growing sense of doom in the Karnataka capital. Last month, the Bangalore Forum for Information Technology — an informal body of about 20 leading IT companies — announced that it was boycotting the city’s mega annual IT showcase event, IT.IN. The boycott is in protest against the city’s shoddy infrastructure.

Odd paradox

In an industry where time is money, poor infrastructure directly dents the bottomline. “Time is critical to a BPO,” says Nagarajan S., founder and COO, 24/7 Customer, a BPO located in Bangalore’s ITPL. “If employees reach office 15 minutes late, it hits profits,” he adds. Some IT companies in the city have already begun to add more man-days to project proposals to cater to commuter crawl. Siemens India Ltd has changed its work hours to eight-to-five so employees can avoid rush hour traffic.

Industry discontent is showing up in surveys. A Teamlease Gallup Employment Outlook Survey, conducted in May this year, shows Bangalore’s Business Confidence Index (BCI) as the lowest in its city-wise ranking, grading way below Calcutta, Chennai and Hyderabad. Says Nirupama V.G., associate director, Teamlease Service Pvt. Ltd, “Low BCI indicates a negative change in perception about Bangalore. The city’s poor infrastructure is beginning to play on the minds of decision makers.”

“The S.M. Krishna government was perceived as pro-active,” explains Paul. It set up the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF) — a public-private partnership that made public services accountable to citizens. The Bangalore Mahanagar Palike’s property tax collection doubled during its tenure. The Bangalore Development Authority announced large-scale plans to develop infrastructure. The city police launched an elaborate one-way system to address the city’s traffic problems.

Perceptions did an about-turn with a change in government last year. “Public meetings and feedback indicate an all-time low level of satisfaction. People feel public services have touched rock-bottom in Bangalore,” says Paul.

Experts believe that Bangalore’s chaos is the result of an odd paradox. “While IT companies have scaled up operations, the state’s coalition government has scaled down development work,” says V. Ravichandar, former member of the BATF and CEO, Feedback Consulting, a market research firm.

When the Dharam Singh government came to power, the first thing it did was drop the BATF. “The BATF gave visibility and accountability to the government. Its disintegration brought bad PR to Bangalore,” says Ravichandar.

India’s fastest growing city — Bangalore’s population has almost doubled in the last five years — became unique in the speed of its decline. Five years ago, investment banker Rahul Singh took 20 minutes to travel the eight-km distance from office to home. “When I got home, I had the energy and enthusiasm to wash up and hit a pub with friends,” recalls Singh. Today, Singh takes over one hour to get home. The traffic jam ensures he returns with a temper. The blaring horns cause daily migraine attacks. And courtesy the air pollution, Singh is down with a throat infection every two months. A one-time ardent fan of Bangalore, he now wants to quit the city.

There are many like Singh who are finding it difficult to cope with the city’s polluted air. Nandini Mundkur, paediatrician and chief of Bangalore Children’s Hospital (BCH), says she sees around 40 children every day with asthma, wheezing and other lung-related ailments. “The numbers have shot up by over 50 per cent in the last five years,” she says.

Bangalore ranks second — next to Delhi — in carbon monoxide concentration. The suspended particulate matter is above permissible limits. “Rampant construction has drastically increased dust levels in the air,” says M.D.N. Sinha, senior environment officer, Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB).

The rise in construction is evident — there are highrises coming up all over the city, and areas that were once thought remote are being developed as residential colonies. A three-bedroom flat in Whitefield — an uninhabited colony with no roads on the city’s outskirts — costs between Rs 35 lakh and Rs 40 lakh. “Five years ago, there were no takers for a flat in Whitefield,” says a city-based real estate agent.

The city, clearly, is bursting at the seams. But statistics show that foreign firms are pouring into Bangalore at a rate of three a week. The city’s 1,300 software and outsourcing companies — 450 of them are multinationals — have set up sprawling campuses, employing 1,70,000 workers. Every month, companies such as Infosys, Wipro and IBM hire over 1,000 people each.

The 2000 census says Bangalore’s population grew at a rate of 61.36 per cent in the last decade, as compared with Calcutta’s 19.9 per cent and Delhi’s 47 per cent. The city’s skyline has transformed, with highrise apartments that squeeze in the ever-growing numbers of professionals streaming into the city.

More people mean more vehicles — the city had 21 lakh vehicles in 2004, up from 14 lakh in 2003. The number of vehicles on Bangalore’s roads is going up by 50 per cent per annum, compared with Delhi’s 10-12 per cent increase in vehicles since 2000. Calcutta, in contrast, has a total of 9.5 lakh vehicles — up by 2.5 lakh in the last five years.

But Bangalore’s roads can take a load of only seven lakh vehicles. “One in four Bangaloreans owns a vehicle; every BPO firm runs a mini transport company of its own; while the traffic police has only 1,450 constables. It’s a sure case for chaos,” says K.V.R. Tagore, additional commissioner of police, traffic.

Chaos has been stalking the city in different forms. Power and water supply are the first to feel the heat. The city’s electricity demand increased by 40 per cent in five years, while supply grew by two per cent, according to a survey by a city-based business school, Alliance Business Academy.

Dead end

Not surprisingly, power cuts are routine. Last Sunday, south Bangalore went without electricity for 12 hours. Most IT companies rely on their own power back-up. Recently, Bangalore’s most famous billionaire, Azim Premji, was left fumbling in the dark when the lights went off during a presentation to a foreign client. No wonder Premji has officially announced that Wipro will not expand any further in Bangalore.

A water crisis is round the corner. The city’s water supply has increased from 270 million litres per day (mld) in 2000 to 860 mld in 2005. “But supply falls short of the city’s water demand of 1,100 mld,” says Prahallad Rao, spokesperson, Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board. Bangalore’s main source of water, Hesaraghatta Lake, dried up last year. Another primary water source, the T.G. Halli Lake, is set to follow suit. “Residential apartments have been constructed in the lake’s catchment area. It won’t last for long,” says IISc’s Ramachandra.

Bangalore is a city of contradictions. And nothing underlines that better than increasing joblessness. While code writers find a job under every stone, unemployment has grown by 18 per cent in the low-income group since 2000. “Economic disparity has led to a spurt in crime,” says Ramanathan. The city’s crime rate is up by 18 per cent and among the targets of robberies are IT personnel. The police have been advising IT professionals not to wear their ID cards outside office, as it makes them soft targets.

A recent study by research and analysis firm Gartner Inc — titled, IT Outsourcing to India — Analysis of Cities — shows that Hyderabad and Chennai will replace Bangalore and Mumbai as favoured destinations for IT outsourcing by 2010. Some Bangaloreans believe that may well be a cause for celebration.