Infohighway throttlenecked in Old Bangalore

Infohighway throttlenecked in Old Bangalore
The Inquirer

THEY'RE BUILDING massive IT blocks in Bangalore but joining the dotted lines between the science and IT parks is a highway system that resembles the arteries of a candidate for a major bypass.

A lot of people talk to Bangalore, the capital of Indian state Karnatake every day without knowing it because it's also the capital of call centres. There's a massive Dell facility which is currently being extended while all the other big IT names including HP, IBM, Microsoft and Intel also have a big presence in the city.

The race to grab land and build yet more blocks has also got to be something of a race against time too, because although a line is the shortest distance between two points, the roads in the city have pretty much clapped out under the strain of the growth.

A journey which ought to take just 10 or 15 minutes as the crow flies, can stretch into an hour and more at rush hour. The rush to build, build, and build again is such that vast complexes housing 10s of thousands of people are served by roads that can be little better than dirt tracks.

The government is attempting to redress the problems - it plans to build a metro, for example, but that is years down the way. We didn't see many wider roads being built. Last Sunday, India's Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi paid a visit to Bangalore and the roads simply stopped from the number of Congress supporters being bussed in.

Getting a taxi is hard anyroad. Many of the call support centres have commissioned the city taxi service for their own purposes, and that leaves you with the option of catching one of the tuk-tuks or take a bus. There's plenty of buses. You could take the three rupee option and stand cheek by jowl with the folk who have to travel to work this way, or the 50 rupee air conditioned luxury bus with guaranteed seat. Either way, you'll sit in the same traffic jam for quite a while. Perhaps, if you pass the massive Sai Baba complex and you're frustrated by the traffic you could contemplate taking up meditation?

Boom bang a bang
The result of the inforush has been a bonanza for property developers. Houses which cost $100,000 just a few years ago, are changing hands for $1.5 million.

If you're the CEO of a multinational based abroad, you need never go further than two miles from the airport and tip up at the swish Leela Kempinski hotel, complete with inbuilt mall, lagoon, and enough luxury to make you think you were on a different planet. The hotel, built in Art Deco style, is only six years old and command nightly room rates that would make a hardened international traveller quake in her or his wellington boots. Add the luxury tax that all foreigners pay and you'll end up paying more a night than many locals earn in a month.

The bad news for the Leela Kampinski is that the authorities are moving the city airport, which serves international destinations, right the way across the city. But by that time the ring road might be built, sparing the multinational CEOs from seeing things that might disturb their sweet dreams.

Driving through the different scientific and the industrial zones of Bangalore, you can't ignore the expansion that will make things worse for the infrastructure before they get better. We must have counted between 80 and 100 vast projects set to rise high.

The inforush in Bangalore still has a way to go before it reaches its peak, we estimate. A whole number of multimationals including Tesco, Sun, Accenture, SAP, AOL and others have or will shortly have the vast majority of their software development based here. Tesco, we understand, runs its entire supply management and software from Bangalore, which may be news to Brits who order their Marmite from the megagrocers online.

Software development in Bangalore has reached critical mass and there's no going back. It can only be good news for India but the city is clearly under some strain and those don't look like easing in the foreseeable future. If a bypass isn't suitable for the patient, perhaps the judicious insertion of stents at the bottlenecks will prevent InfoCity from having a massive coronary.