Bengaluru, which has a high concentration of IT companies and scientific institutions, is inevitably troubled when it rains. Life gets paralysed, parts of the city get flooded, roads including flyovers become streams, homes get inundated, underpasses threaten to become death traps for motorists, trees get uprooted, and the traffic—terrible even when it does not rain—breaks its own congestion records. There was 52 mm of rain in the early hours of Monday which brought the city to a halt and left four school kids and two adults injured from tree falls. About the impact of flooding on the traffic, the less said the better. This is the sorry state of India’s IT capital, one of its most global cities.
Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar, who is also minister for Bengaluru development, harps on developing Brand Bengaluru. But seeing his project taking off is difficult even after he has been in office for more than a year. Opposition parties and a large section of citizens blame the spending on the guarantees—nearly Rs 60,000 crore a year—for the lack of funds preventing some dream projects from seeing the light of day. Urban experts have blamed the flooding on mindless concretisation. They demand removal of encroachments of lakes and stormwater drains, and of constructions obstructing the natural paths of rainwater. They advocate following in the footsteps of Shanghai, which realised its mistake of high concretisation and launched the ‘sponge city’ initiative of replacing concrete with permeable pavements and improved green cover to allow water to drain into the soil.
The surge in Bengaluru’s reputation as an IT hub has far outpaced the infrastructure growth needed to sustain a city expanding in every direction. It got congested despite the expansion. Unfortunately, government actions—irrespective of which party ruled—added to the city’s woes. For example, the now-infamous Hebbal flyover, meant to solve traffic problems at a key junction on the road connecting the city with its international airport, has itself turned into a “mother of all bottlenecks”. The issue easily gets politicised. But now, it’s time to sink all political differences and come together with experts to not only make Bengaluru liveable and sustainable, but also to remove the blemish on its global reputation.
