BENGALURU: Nearly 40°C heat in Bengaluru has intensified debate over policy-driven urban stress, with environmental experts and civic activists linking rising temperatures to the ‘Urban Heat Island’ effect caused by dense concretisation, shrinking green cover and unplanned growth.
Critics have blamed policies such as setback relaxation, premium FAR, and up to 15% deviation regularisation in recent draft amendments for encouraging violations and accelerating the city’s heat crisis.
Environmentalists told The New Indian Express that Bengaluru should not be suffering because of the government’s inability to provide governance and enforce planning laws.
Referring to the Bengaluru heat map – A Satellite-Based Urban Heat Assessment of Bengaluru (Land Surface Temperature Analysis) – experts pointed out that Whitefield, Marathahalli, Bellandur, KR Puram, Electronics City, Sarjapur Road, the Outer Ring Road belt and parts of Yelahanka towards the outskirts have emerged as the hottest zones owing to high concrete cover, heavy traffic, low tree cover and loss of lakes and wetlands.
In contrast, cooler zones continue to include Malleswaram, Sadashivanagar, Basavanagudi, Jayanagar, Cubbon Park, Lalbagh Botanical Garden, parts of Banashankari and lake and green spaces in older Bengaluru.
Environmentalist and urban activist Sandeep Anirudhan objected to the Draft Amendment to the Bengaluru City Corporation Building Bye-Laws, 2003, and said repeated attempts to regularise building violations were worsening the city’s environmental and infrastructure crisis.
“We elect a government to provide governance and ensure rule of law, not dilute it. Areas developed after the 1980s have become heat islands due to illegal layouts, PGs, slums and unauthorised buildings, particularly in East Bengaluru,” he said, adding that the government was “legitimising” violations through condonation schemes instead of taking action.
“These actions do not solve the problem — they reward and perpetuate it. The government is not only failing to solve the issue, but is becoming part of the problem,” he said, while calling for a redevelopment authority to rebuild illegal layouts with proper infrastructure and environmental safeguards.
Suresh Heblikar, another environmentalist, said unregulated urban growth and weak enforcement mechanisms are pushing Indian metropolitan cities towards ecological collapse. “Growth is not development. Development should leave no scope for violations or unauthorised growth. Unfortunately, we do not have such practices or regulations,” he said, warning that cities were “ecologically crumbling, polluting and wiping out their basic ecological wealth”.
Ganesan, a scientist and botanist associated with the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), said Bengaluru was going beyond its ecological carrying capacity owing to unchecked migration, concretisation and weakening enforcement of planning regulations. “Some parts of Bengaluru are witnessing steadily increasing temperatures. The city is going beyond its ecological and infrastructural limits, generating more heat and intensifying urban heat island effects,” he said.
Ganesan also criticised the dilution of building regulations, saying authorities were increasingly favouring buildings that violated rules while ignoring long-term environmental damage.
Experts stressed that while the city’s rising heat crisis may not be completely reversible, it can still be addressed through stricter planning and enforcement measures focused on increasing green cover, protecting lakes, and wetlands, and balancing unchecked concretisation with sustainable urban development.