`Silicon Valley' drained of reputation

`Silicon Valley' drained of reputation

The Hindu

Rains expose the poor cousin of the IT centre in California


Bangalore: After the severe battering the reputation of Bangalore has taken from the heavy rains and the deluge, one wonders if anyone dares to call it the "Silicon Valley" or the older extolment "Garden City".

The many newcomers to the city have now understood and experienced that Bangalore is a city of four valleys, which have turned out to be valleys of death and doom, through which gushes out sewage from the city — Vrushabhavathi, Hebbal, Chellaghatta and Koramangala — and not the Silicon Valley spoken of in advertisement hoardings and foyers of luxury hotels. It is the four valleys which have carried the reputation of Bangalore down the drain.

`Kalyan Nagara'

It was always amusing to hear successive mayors of the city going overboard in extravagant praise of Bangalore as the "Garden City" or "Kalyan Nagara", very often standing on a tombstone in Goripalya or nearby Padarayanapura or even better slums.

Today, no one hazards a guess on the number of slums. In 1981 a legislature committee headed by the late T.N. Narasimha Murthy placed their number at 400. It was after the programme of creation of slums was implemented with gusto by a forgotten politician M.D. Nataraj, son-in-law of former Chief Minister Devaraj Urs.

Many thinking people have often wondered why Bangalore should have been advertised as "Silicon Valley" at all. They realised long ago that it is a poor slum cousin of that in distant California, U.S. But the hacks producing tourist guides were not to be put off by the grim realities. They might now jump on the other dubious distinction Bangalore has earned — the city with the third most expensive hotels in the world.

Polemics

It is noteworthy that the deluge in the city followed the stormy polemics between industry and some political leaders over the state of infrastructure in the city. The latter have accused the industry, information technology in particular, of attempting to make out that the infrastructure has deteriorated after the coalition came to power.

The politicians ranged against the industry on the infrastructure have a point. They have in support the World Bank-Confederation of Indian Industry Investment Climate Assessment Report (2004), which quotes 61 per cent of the respondents to their survey as having said, "Indeed it is in Karnataka that the largest proportion of businesses — 61 — rate infrastructure as a major-to-severe bottleneck to industrial growth".

Power supply

Karnataka has been ranged among the better-climate States. No doubt those in business and industry have cited shortage or unreliability of power supply. They have also grouped Karnataka along with Kerala and Tamil Nadu as a State where transport is a bottleneck. Though the reference is to Karnataka in general, the industrialists and businessmen have pointed to Bangalore. Though any talk of inadequate infrastructure in the city is being used to score points or elicits angry outbursts, the State Government itself recognised it in the mid-1980s.

It is now almost forgotten that the Ramakrishna Hegde government adopted an industrial policy in 1986 banning the starting of new major industries in the city. Information technology or biotechnology was not the in-thing those days and the city's strength in precision engineering and manufacturing, including the plastic industry, and the presence of the public sector giants were being spoken of. That policy was given a quiet burial in 1994 and a new one adopted.

Betterment fees

It is also of interest that the Bangalore Mahanagara Palike and the seven discredited city municipal councils (CMCs) on the city's outskirts have collected improvement cess (betterment fees) from property owners in the areas which have suffered the maximum from the rains. The flooding has now come as an insult to the injury of the levy.

The only improvement that appears to have been carried out is to build huge uncovered drains along even business highways such as Hosur Road and Mysore Road.

It was one such drain running along in the vast slum known as Bommanahalli that inundated the ground floor of one of the offices of the IT giant Wipro. The cry of the IT industry about poor infrastructure cannot be sneered at. Over two decades ago, L.R. Vagale, a well-known town planner from the city, who was one of those who built the Vidhana Soudha, raised eyebrows when he repeatedly called Bangalore a "garbage city" in a speech at the Institution of Engineers. It is now much more with choked drains and with potholes as large as the warts on the face of the moon.

The Bangalorean need not join ISRO's man-on-the-moon mission!