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Can India’s Silicon Valley make it as a megacity?
Dizzyingly dynamic, Bengaluru has reached a fork in the road that will determine its future
Sometimes, in Bengaluru, you still feel you’re in a small town. The cantonment area, where Indian military barracks have replaced the British army’s, retains some of the green spaciousness (and English street names) of colonial times. Bengaluru’s famously gentle climate, India’s best, with temperatures rarely exceeding 30C, helped persuade the British to set up here. The cantonment’s roads were built for the occasional officer’s car, and for cycling Indians.
But today those roads are jammed with traffic. In 2022, Bengaluru had the world’s second most congested city centre (after London), calculated satellite navigation maker TomTom. Bengaluru has shot from about 700,000 inhabitants at independence to 14 million or so today, far more than London or New York. The population has doubled just since 2005 — stunning growth even for a developing-world city. To the western visitor, Bengalureans look weirdly young: India’s median age is 28.
The one-time sleepy southern “Pensioner’s Paradise”, where shops opened late, has become “India’s Silicon Valley”. It feels as dizzyingly dynamic as Manchester must have mid-Industrial Revolution. Now Bengaluru has reached a fork in the packed road: will it become a superstar city like New York or a dysfunctional one like Mumbai? Success will require handling the challenges facing all developing cities: tame the traffic, protect the local environment, cope with climate change and allow migrants from different places to live together in peace. Bengaluru’s history as a tech hub goes back to 1909, when the now world-beating Indian Institute of Science was founded. Countless educational institutions followed, and today the city’s talent works in start-ups, call centres, the research centres of global companies or the headquarters of Indian tech corporations like Infosys. Each new software developer creates jobs for maids, waiters and delivery riders, so Bengaluru expands, almost daily, through both gated communities and slums.
Migrants change a city, and the city changes them. In a functioning metropolis, new arrivals don’t merely get richer. They fulfil themselves in ways they couldn’t back home. “In Bengaluru, you can weave your way through the traffic and find yourself,” said author Shoba Narayan at this month’s Bangalore Literature Festival, where youthful crowds were another sign of the city’s cultural blossoming.
One young migrant, a woman from Kolkata, told me: “Youngsters make the rules here.” In historically tolerant Bengaluru, they can live in sometimes mixed-gender flatshares, flirt in the bookshops on Church Street, go on dates in the city’s booming pub scene and make their own marriage markets away from their parents. Women here can wear jeans and T-shirts, and go out at night with less fear than in Delhi.
Bengaluru’s problem is liveability. The city is “crumbling under its own success”, write Malini Goyal and Prashanth Prakash in Unboxing Bengaluru. The one-time “garden city” is now often redubbed the “garbage city”. The vast majority of its famous lakes have been built over, threatening drinking water supplies. The rich are cordoning themselves off in new suburbs, diluting what should be the creative alchemy of a great city. These suburbs need to become accessible hubs, so that Bengaluru can acquire multiple centres faster than Paris or London did.
Bengaluru’s advantage is its late expansion. That means it can avoid the blunders of 20th-century megacities, which remade themselves for cars only to find that the endless flyovers ruined liveability and ended up clogged too. Cars can be a solution for small towns, but cities of millions can’t squeeze them in. Bengaluru’s subway only opened in 2011, but it’s expanding fast. The city needs to construct almost immediately the local rail infrastructure that London built over nearly two centuries. The logical complement would be bike lanes — a return to India’s cycling past — but these now seem unthinkable, as the cars leave no space.
Some great cities won’t survive climate change. Bengaluru starts from a better place than boiling, smog-clogged Delhi or flood-prone coastal Mumbai, but the heat is worsening here. Last year was the city’s wettest on record.
All multicultural cities face another threat: ethnic conflict, especially in Narendra Modi’s Hindu-supremacist India. By 2011, 107 languages were spoken in Bengaluru, the highest number in India. Some Kannada-speaking locals, nostalgic for their lost paradise, grumble about the newcomers, especially poorer migrants from northern India.
Good governance could manage these problems, but good governance isn’t a Bengaluru tradition. It’s probably already too late for the city to become a New York. But there’s still time to do better than Mumbai.
By Simon Kuper, Financial Times, London, December 14, 2023
Avan, Aval Adhu 527
The moment they got out of their company owned sedan, Madhu took his hand in hers and when he looked at their clasped hands, she said, ' Just in case you wander off and get lost. I lost you once and I will not make that mistake again. Come, we will go wash our feet in the river and then enter the temple.'
The river Madhu was talking about was none other than the Hooghly River that flowed through Kolkota and onwards into the open arms of the Bay of Bengal.
Ravi slowly walked down the steps and into the river and then folding his new dhoti around his thighs, slowly descended into the waters and stopped when it reached up to his knees. He dipped his hands and then closing his eyes he stood quietly in prayer.
Then hearing her dainty feet splashing through the water he turned and smiled at her when she came down the steps and stood next to him with the water reaching up to her waist.
' Jaanu, I could not let you pray alone when I know for whom and to whom you are praying.'
Ravi thanked her and then both of them with their eyes closed prayed for the departed Meenakshi's soul to rest in eternal peace.
Then bending down, he scooped up the Hooghly in his palms and in a voice full of wonder, said, ' Everything is in motion. Everything in this Universe is moving towards something ' and pointing in the northernly direction with his left hand, ' These waters of the Hooghly comes from the Gangotri glacier somewhere far up in the Himalayas and nearly 1400 kms away from here and then flows into the Bengal sea.
Taking her hand, he gently kissed it and looked at her and said, ' But the distance between Kolkota and Chennai is more, 200 kms more than that and yet your soul and my soul found each other and today we stand as one flowing as one and into each other.'
' Beautiful, Jaanu ' she said and kissed his hand that covered her tiny one and said, ' I had to come. I had to come for you are my source and the point from which my life energy flows .'
Ravi smiled and said, ' That is why I am here, Madhu. It does not matter where you are, for I will always come for you and be with you.'
She looked at the slow but steadily flowing waters of the Hooghly and said, ' The river flows to be one with the sea and the ocean and now my sea has flowed up and into my river. A miracle indeed.'
' A miracle ma'am. Maybe but in the end it is just water flowing into water and love seeking love to become true love.'
She pinched his cheek playfully, ' My charming and talented poet, your thoughts and imagination are profoundly beautiful. Maybe it is time you penned them down got yourself published.'
Shaking his head, Ravi said, ' No. My thoughts and my words are for you and this Universe alone. For it is you that wells up from my soul as my thoughts and my words. Without you in my mind, I am nothing but an empty page and an empty pen.'
Tears sprang up in her eyes like the first drops of water springing up from the Gangotri glacier and then they dropped down and flowed down her cheeks like the Ganges flowing down the Himalayas and she looked at him and whispered, ' Jaanu, Ami tomake bhalabasi amara isbara.'
' ami o tomake balobasi ( I too love you ) ' and saying that, he looked at her and asked, ' What do those two words, amara isbara, mean?'
She smiled lovingly and replied, ' It means Angel and God.'
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