Meltdown

Meltdown
New Indian Express



Bangalore's growth has been exponential, both in terms of population and its urban sprawl. The city's population has already touched 6.5 million, with a daily floating population of 15 lakh. At present Bangalore spreads over 500 sq km. If current projections are correct, Bangalore will spread over 1,000 sq km by 2011 and cross 1,500 sq km area by 2025 to accommodate a 10 million-plus population. Along with Bangalore, its 10 satellite towns - Anekal, Channapatna, Devanhalli, Dodballapur, Hoskote, Kanakapura, Magadi, Nelmangala, Ramanagaram, and Vijayapura - are also exploding. Between 1991 and 2001, their population growth rate has ranged from 15 per cent to 57 per cent.

Much of Bangalore's growth has been driven by the IT revolution. "The way IT industry has grown in Bangalore is phenomenal…. In 1999, there were hardly 700 registered IT companies in Bangalore. This grew to 1,624 in October 2005. During the same time, the number of people directly employed in this sector also increased from 20,000 to 300,000. Indirect employment is three times higher. Even today as many as eight new IT companies are being registered every week in Bangalore," says an official of the department of information technology and biotechnology in Karnataka.

What has made this boom possible is that the state government pulled out the stops to ensure all manner of incentives to attract IT companies and ensure unhindered growth. Among the incentives were: exemption from payment of tax on computer hardware and peripherals and other capital goods; grant of industrial status for lower electricity tariff; priority in sanctioning power connections; and exemption from power cuts - the list is endless.

The growth has fuelled the demand for office space. Commercial Dynamics in Bangalore, Assessment and Understanding: Sectoral report no 3, prepared by consultants SCE Consortium in collaboration with Chesterton Meghraj Property Consultants, says that against 0.13 million sq metre in 2000, almost 0.63 million sq metre of office space was added to Bangalore in 2003. Moreover, in the coming three to four years another 1.86-2.04 million sq metre will be added in the IT corridor, 0.09-0.14 million sq metre in the central business district and 0.74-0.93 million sq metre in the suburbs.

This exponential growth has not only jacked up land prices but also an insatiable appetite for land. On the outskirts of the city, agriculturists are being forced to sell their land at throwaway prices. Either, the government acquires it or private players get into the speculative game. The operation is orchestrated. Farmers have no choice but to sell their land and go work in a factory.

Bellandur exemplifies how Bangalore has eaten into its rural belt to accommodate IT. Located in Bangalore south taluka, it was a rich and prosperous village famous for its vegetables, dairy products and fish that were supplied to Bangalore. But things started to change as IT began to grow into semi-urban and rural areas. Ring roads plotted Bellandur's downfall. "In 1996, the government approached us to acquire land to construct the ring road. But along with the road, it also wanted to acquire 250 metres on either side of the road along the entire 12.5 km stretch. The idea was to give it off to private builders for construction. Farmers were offered the paltry sum of Rs 3.5 lakh per acre for fertile agriculture land. We fought tooth and nail but could not stop the road project. This road has changed our life. Along with it came other huge development projects for the IT industry - office complexes, residential colonies, shopping malls, etc. Bellandur tank is polluted with sewage and there is hardly any farming left. Instead villagers have haphazardly constructed ugly four-storey houses and rented these out. Migrant labourers teem in the five villages falling under Bellandur panchayat," says K Jagannath, former chairperson of the Bellandur gram panchayat.

The situation isn't any different in Yelahanka and K R Puram hoblis in northern side of Bangalore where the Arkavathi layout is coming up. Touted as the biggest BDA residential layout, it is spread over 1,113 ha, with a total project cost, including land acquisition, of Rs 950 crore. It covers 16 villages and proposes to construct 20,000 residential sites with dual water supply lines for potable and non- potable uses, and a tertiary treatment plant. Displaced farmers are seething as a large police force has been employed. In other villages, as well, people have taken up cudgels against any land acquisition.

The problem is that Bangalore's urban infrastructure - roads, water, sewerage, sanitation and public transport - hasn't grown at anything like the same rate, and development priorities have been skewed by the city's excessive reliance on IT.

The Karnataka government claims to be working towards making Bangalore top drawer. A number of infrastructure projects for flyovers, widening roads, providing water supply and creating new residential areas are being developed. But, the number of vehicles in Bangalore is increasing by 8.6 per cent per year. At a conservative estimate, 300-350 vehicles are registered every day. By 2020 the city will have over 9.6 million vehicles, up from the existing 1.83 million. And the city's road infrastructure can't even cater to existing vehicles.

A major reason for the steep increase in vehicles is the lack of a working public transport system. Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) boasts of serving 2.65 million people of the city through its 3,200 buses and another 630 hired private buses. But most of them are old and offer poor services. BMTC plans to introduce 200-250 buses every month, but it can't create the roads to run them on.

That's where traffic management comes in. In Bangalore that means only two things: one-ways and flyovers. At last count there were over 375 one-ways, the maximum in any city of the world, each contributing their mite to wastage of fuel and higher levels of air pollution. Flyovers are multiplying - seven already exist, four are under construction and three are in the pipeline. Experts say this doesn't make sense. Flyovers are expensive at Rs 10,000 to Rs 12,000 per km and they just relocate points of congestion. Worse, there is no coordination with other transport projects.

There's a lot of money going into roads and also transport - the Metro Rail and international airport are two of the most contentious. The point is that this could be happening at the expense of other needs - water and sanitation for everyone, for instance. Last year's floods, for instance, played havoc with a plan to upgrade and widen 19 arterial roads.

There is some degree of poetic justice in that. Urban planners and local residents claim the floods were caused by faulty planning resulting from the pressure of having to appease IT. According to George K Kuruvila of GKK Urban Planners & Architectural Consultants, Bangalore: "Road making agencies do not even follow basic principles of construction. Take the case of Cubban road on which for the entire length of 800 m there is no rainwater outlet."

"Bangalore is a city of tanks and lakes. But in an effort to appease IT, tanks are being sold off to real estate agents. Wetlands are being acquired for IT expansion purposes," says Janardhan who works with Oxfam India at Dodballapuram. The result is that Bangalore is thirsty and inundated with waste it can't deal with. It pumps and transports 810 million litres per day (mld) water through an elevation of 500 metres, losing almost 30 to 40 per. To maintain pumping, 65 per cent of the Rs 353-crore budget of the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) is earmarked for electricity charges. To sustain the water supply target of 100 litres per capita per day (lpcd), another Rs 3,384 crore - the Cauvery IV scheme - is being implemented to supply an additional 500 mld water. In the last three and a half decades, Bangalore has already spent over Rs 1,710 crore in sourcing its water from Cauvery, which is bound to become more and more expensive in future.

To meet their water needs, Bangaloreans have resorted to groundwater extraction. According to K V Raju, professor, ecological economics unit, at the Bangalore based Institute for Social and Economic Change, "Against a domestic water demand of 1,280 mld (at 200 lpcd), BWSSB supplies 533 mld. And given the fact that average water use is at least 300-400 lpcd, almost 750 million litres of groundwater is being extracted in Bangalore daily." Consequently, groundwater levels are dipping fast. Bangalore wouldn't have been in such bad shape if it were protected by its tanks and lakes, which provided water and acted as water- management systems, preventing floods and providing natural drainage channels.

The pitfalls of Bangalore's planning are not limited to logistic issues. "In the entire planning process, there is neither any space for local people nor ward committees and panchayats. The sidelining of elected members was happening for quite sometime in Bangalore but it got epitomised when S M Krishna constituted the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF), which tilted the balance away from constitutional ways of governance to corporate governance by creating parastatal organisations," says Gururaja Budhya, secretary of the Bangalore-based Urban Research Centre. The BATF, formed in 1999, was headed by the Infosys managing director Nandan Nilekani.

The 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments were passed in 1993, to decentralise and give an imprimatur to self-governing authorities. The Constitution mandates setting up metropolitan planning committee and district planning committees, but these have not been set up in Bangalore. Ward committees were recently set up, but experts say these are only on paper and remain non-functional. Clifton D'Rozario of the Bangalore based think tank Alternative Law Forum notes: "The spirit of these amendments was to enforce decentralization and development planning through local governance… In the context of Bangalore's rapid urbanisation, what we are witness to is the further concentration of development planning and de facto governance (of areas coming under the panchayat and municipal council jurisdiction) with the urban bodies such as the BDA and parastatal bodies… the State government has played truant in the application of these decentralization processes… the State is still pursuing the policy of envisaging and implementing projects in a centralised manner with no participation of the local bodies of self-governance. These projects include the International Airport, Arkavathy Layout, the Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor, and the IT Corridor."

The bottom line is that with the government and the political class abdicating from its responsibilities and representative institution being by-passed, IT is in a position to exploit.