Bangalore has several pressing problems

Bangalore has several pressing problems

By Amrit Dhillon
The Age, Australia

India's hi-tech capital, Bangalore, is imploding from the pressure on its aged infrastructure, and it's not a pretty sight. When the city recently experienced unusually heavy rain, its innards - from drains and sewers - were splattered all over the place.

For years now, Indian and foreign chief executives of information technology (IT) companies based in Bangalore have been shouting from the rooftops about an impeding collapse but nothing has been been able to jolt the Government out of its lethargy.

If the IT industry put India on the map, the centre of the IT revolution has been Bangalore, in southern India. Single-handedly, the city, with its modern, happening image, has rid India of its snake-charmer image.

The IT industry now employs more than 1 million people. Of these, 200,000 are in Bangalore.

Over the past five or six years, as Intel, Dell, Siemens, Hewlett Packard, Infosys and Wipro and others have set up shop here, it became known as India's Silicon Valley.

After last months rain, though, it looked like a war zone. Residents struggled with waterlogged roads, flooded basements and snakes and frogs sneaking into houses. But, even before the rains, the city had been grinding to a standstill. Power cuts are common. Air and noise pollution is terrible. The traffic is so bad it takes 1½ hours to travel 10 kilometres.

Executives with the city's 1560 IT companies avoid lunchtime meetings in central Bangalore. "Every day its a damned chaotic mess. I spend half my time stuck in traffic jams," says call centre executive Nilesh Raman.

A decent hotel room is hard to get, even at an exorbitant tariff. Some businessmen prefer to fly in from Madras in the neighbouring state for meetings and fly back the same night.

If, that is, they can bear arriving at the apology of an airport. A new international airport is planned but it has been on paper for 15 years.

Dutch-born chief executive officer Bob Hoekstra of Philips Software has taken to cycling around the city. "There's no planning, no vision. The civic agencies work in isolation. There is no co-ordination. Everything is falling apart in front of my eyes," he says.

Bangalore accounts for 35 per cent of India's software exports, whose worth is expected to cross $16 billion this year. It is bursting with educated professionals - call centre workers and software developers. There are 36,571 cars for every 100,000 people, the highest ratio in India, and yet the roads are essentially the same as 20 years ago.

Bangalore needs new roads, flyovers, underpasses and a metro system. It needs new drains and bigger sewers, as the recent deluge demonstrated.

Its ecosystem has been ruined by the building explosion: shops, bus stands, parking bays, office complexes, and townships have risen on every bit of open space and on the lakes that used to let the city breathe.

In the rush to build and make money, developers have felled trees and covered stormwater drains. The lakes around which Bangalore was built have become precious real estate. Twenty years ago, there were nearly 400 lakes; now there are 64.

"The lakes and water tanks were interconnected, an integral part of the ecosystem. They could absorb heavy rain. It was a natural drainage system. But now there is nowhere for the water to go," says Shashidhar Reddy, a former official with the city council.

If companies start voting with their feet, Bangalore could be in trouble. As it is, some companies are already choosing Madras, also in the south, or looking further afield to set up offices or to expand.

"We just don't act. We keep discussing things, discussing infrastructure, while the Koreans, Chinese, Malaysians and Thais talk less and do more," says Jaithirth Rao, chief executive of outsourcing company MphasiS.