The Plateau of the Valley

Just another day in another infrastructure-shortchanged Indian city? Just another day, right, but this is not just any other city and Hosur Road is not just another arterial road. It leads to Electronics City, the hub of India’s Silicon Valley, where geeks with impressive strings of letters after their name write codes for multinational giants 25,000 km away. And at the other end of the road are the offices of a couple of the most admired Indian companies in the world, Infosys and Wipro.

To be fair, there is a specific reason why a 5-km commute takes well over a 15 minutes on this stretch. A flyover is being built at the crossing of the Jayadeva Institute of Cardiology, Bangalore Dairy Circle and Madiwala Silk Board. But in more ways than one, the state of affairs at this crucial junction sums up why the Valley is rapidly plateauing.

The temperate climate, the pleasant environs, the quality educational institutions, the upbeat work culture, all of which combined to push Bangalore to the top of the global IT map, are still valid. The crisis has crept in through basic man-unmade factors: power, roads, water, infrastructure. After a decade of unchecked expansion, Bangalore is creaking under its own weight. Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation buses move at a stately pace of 9 kmph through the city. In a city of 60 lakh (18 lakh of which is the floating population), there are 17 lakh vehicles, 11 lakh of them two-wheelers. A green belt marked by the authorities has been taken over by the authorities themselves for conversion into residential and office complexes.

And it’s not just the authorities who are to blame. Every other road in the city has been dug up by private optic fibre companies to lay the cables necessary for a strong bandwidth network. Despite a Bangalore City Corporation (BCC) directive that roads should not be touched and dug-up pavements should be paved afresh, the ‘IT City’ sobriquet could well be challenged by ‘Pothole City’ today.

SINCE even the chorus of all those packed into rush-hour static traffic don’t reach the administration, it is left to the Wipro and Infosys chiefs to do the honours. Recalling the hardships faced by the software industry before the development of Electronics City in the early ’90s, Wipro chairman Azim Premji says, ‘‘Software professionals had to take a morcha to the government to kickstart the construction of the roads.’’

Today, it is a measure of the IT industry’s clout that newspapers need only devote a few column centimetres to Premji’s outburst on the state of the roads and the power supply to have the government act immediately. After some initial resistance, Karnataka Chief Minister S M Krishna set up a task force led by the chief secretary on July 22 to look into the problems of development. Not just that. With India’s software supremo and Chief Mentor of Infosys Technologies N R Narayana Murthy admitting defeat at the hands of babus, the IT-savvy Krishna has asked the task force to investigate how the government could help in sustaining the image of Bangalore as the IT Capital of India.

‘‘It is really strange how we have to fight our own government at times to get things done,’’ says Murthy. For the past one year, he has been trying to convince the government to allow more Lufthansa flights out of Bangalore to promote business ties with Western Europe. ‘‘But no one has bothered to reply. No one has even heard me as yet,’’ he says ruefully.

It is not just Murthy and Premji who have voiced their grouse with the state of the infrastructure in Bangalore. ‘‘We need to upgrade our airport, public transportation and hotel facilities to international standards as soon as possible. This will help Bangalore in attracting more foreign investment and clients,’’ says Som Mittal, chairman of the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), the apex software association body, and president and CEO of Digital GlobalSoft.

THE absence of a sense of urgency in doing something about the infrastructure is what bothers the top honchos of Bangalore the most. ‘‘Public transportation has to be improved a lot. We need many more international flights landing in Bangalore. People are getting busier and they need convenient connectivity,’’ says Ashok Soota, former president of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and chairman of MindTree Technologies.

As a case in point, consider the international airport. A new one — hyped as India’s first greenfield airport — has been in the works for at least three years. However, the project is yet to receive all the clearances so it is still to take off.

But then, would a new airport really help if attitudes continue to be medieval? ‘‘India’s airport experience is like something out of Kafka’s novels,’’ says Eric K Clemons, a professor from the prestigious Wharton School of Business, who was asked to unpack his bags twice and body-searched at the Mumbai international airport, prior to catching a flight to New York.

And all this when the BCC has received a Rs 1,000-crore loan from HUDCO for the express purpose of developing the infrastructure in the city.

If government officials are to be believed, they are already on the job. ‘‘We have begun to upgrade the infrastructure in the city. The work on the roads and pavements is nearly complete. We have spent the HUDCO loan on development,’’ says BCC commissioner M R Sreenivas Murthy.

However, the words ring hollow as most potholes are filled with mud, sand and other construction material. And it only takes a brief spell of rain and water-logged drains to make driving on the roads a nightmare.

The Bangalore Development Authority (BDA), responsible for flyover construction in the city, claims to be working on a war-footing. ‘‘The Silk Board junction flyover will be ready by September, the others will follow in the next few months,’’ says Jayakar Jerome, who has built up a reputation for competence.

The scene is not too bright, though, on the power front. ‘‘Firms in Karnataka are reported to face, on an average, daily power cuts of 2.4 hours. The average industrial production losses per unit outage is reported to be Rs 5, imposing substantial costs on the firms,’’ says a World Bank report on Karnataka’s power sector.

Not for nothing does the State have the highest captive power generation units in the country. But IT Department officials would like to project a different picture. ‘‘Software industries will be treated as industrial (and not commercial) consumers and electricity tariff applicable to the industrial consumers will be levied on such industries. As continuous, uninterrupted and quality power supply is one of the prime requirements of sustenance and growth of information technology industries, these industries will be given priority in the sanctioning and servicing of power,’’ they promise.

But is it all lip-service? Premji recounts facing four black-outs in an hour-long meeting with a client. Clemons, the Wharton professor, saw 10 powercuts in a span of 35 minutes. As Soota says: ‘‘There is a lot we need to do. Because what was good enough in the past will not be good enough for the future.’’