Bangalore Crumbling

8216;8216;In the last six months, we have gone back ten years,8217;8217; said Hoekstra, a Bangalore loyalist who said his board could now question a recently approved 50-million new investment. 8216;8216;Bangalore represents India. If the city does not scale up fast, why come here at all?8217;8217; argues Hoekstra, who in October startled the government by boycotting India8217;s signature infotech event, BangaloreIT.com. 8216;8216;If we lose out now, we lose out to China.8217;8217;

The damage to India8217;s biggest brand couldn8217;t have come at a worse time. Foreign investors have poured a record 7.3 billion into India this year 1.4 billion in November alone. The topping to the rising cake of success will come tomorrow as some of the globe8217;s biggest names descend on the World Economic Forum8217;s summit in Delhi to take stock of India8217;s journey.

Here, that journey is wobbling8212;literally.

Lines of vehicles back up along the roads sealed off to allow free access to the three-car motorcade of Karnataka Chief Minister Dharam Singh.

8216;8216;Running this government is a very difficult task, it requires a lot of patience,8217;8217; Singh, 67, tells The Sunday Express with a sigh as his Ambassador Grand barrels down the four lanes of a 12-km stretch of Hosur Road, a ramshackle highway that is the main route to Electronics City, the heart of India8217;s knowledge economy.

Down a side road, waiting as usual8212;even on a holiday8212;is India8217;s biotech icon and richest woman, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw. 8216;8216;How can this happen even on a holiday?8217;8217; fumes a frustrated Shaw later, narrating how growing jams are making two-hour commutes normal, crippling employee productivity, shocking foreign partners and forcing many meetings onto the cell phone.

In July, India8217;s richest man, Wipro Chairman Azim Premji in a rare public outburst said his future investments would not be in Bangalore. Dharam Singh promised redressal. But like Hoekstra, every CEO The Sunday Express spoke to said the downslide since has only gathered pace: if it continues, there will be no option for many but to move.

The patience that Singh prides himself on has worn thin in the gleaming glass towers and lush campuses of 1,200 IT firms and their 2 lakh employees. About a million people and industries feed off them8212;taxis, retail, banking, auto sales, hotels8212;firmly driving Bangalore8217;s booming economy. At stake, then, is much more than the future of investments worth about 15 billion Rs 64,500 crore made in this gridlocking, crumbling city of 7.2 million.

Since the Congress party began its coalition government with Singh8212;an affable leader with a love for Ghalib and ghazals8212;at the helm in June, Bangalore8217;s attempts to transform itself are rapidly unraveling: flyovers are stuck, so is a new international airport and metro, and the roads are simply falling apart.

Worse, the signals are all bad: a dedicated team of officers overseeing the upgradation of Bangalore has been systematically dismantled; and a unique government partnership with the city8217;s big names headed by Infosys MD Nandan Nilekani, which oversaw the city8217;s progress over the last four years, has not just been ignored but even mocked by ministers in Singh8217;s government.

8216;8216;If people know you8217;re trying, they give you the benefit of the doubt,8217;8217; says the CEO of one of India8217;s top three IT companies, requesting anonymity. 8216;8216;The previous improvements weren8217;t Nirvana, but the system was manfully coping, the investments came on the assumption that improvements would continue.8217;8217;

The sense of doom couldn8217;t come at a worse time. Bangalore accounts for 35 per cent of India8217;s software exports: expected to cross 16 billion Rs 70,000 crore this year.

A superheated IT growth rate of about 30 per cent means you can8217;t get a five-star hotel room in Bangalore unless you book more than six months in advance. And no bargains: you must pay the rack rate, which now hovers around 250 a night. Visitors are often sent to resorts upto two hours out of town when the hotels clog.

So six months in a city so besieged by growth implies thousands of new techies, new companies and an explosion of support industries that if support infrastructure doesn8217;t keep up, collapse is around the corner.

As he explains the difficulties of running a coalition government with a previously implacable foe, former Prime Minister Deve Gowda8217;s Janata Dal Secular, Singh does not see the irony of a nine-minute zip down a stretch of road where the Premjis, Narayana Murthys and Shaws spend at least two hours every day stuck in a daily commute that is now among the nation8217;s worst urban journeys.

8216;8216;I met Narayana Murthy and Premji, and I told them for four years we had no rain, this year we had lots of rain,8217;8217; says Singh. 8220;I told them we are pro-poor, pro-farmer. Don8217;t you need political credibility?8217;8217; It8217;s a veiled reference to the rejection of the government of his predecessor S M Krishna8212;who promised to convert Bangalore into another Singapore8212;by rural voters.

8216;8216;At the same time,8217;8217; Singh adds, 8216;8216;Krishna did good work. Bangalore now has a place in the world.8217;8217; Isn8217;t it time then to keep that place instead of losing it to not just to Kochi or Kolkata or Chandigarh, but China?

8216;8216;Madtaiddivi, madtaiddivir, we are doing it, we are doing it,8221; says a defensive Singh, who8217;s promised 15 new flyovers. 8216;8216;You can ask the people of the state, they are very happy.8217;8217;

8216;8216;Yesterday,8217;8217; Singh continues airily, 8216;8216;I opened a flyover8217;8217;. He doesn8217;t mention it was built by the railways over a rail crossing, and had nothing to do with his planners. 8216;8216;I have a fixed time-bound programme. I have released Rs 400 crore for roads, I am monitoring day to day. There were heavy rains first. Now, work will begin.8217;8217;

But the work is sporadic, there is no urgency. At two major flyover sites, workers and engineers have been scarce for the last six months. 8220;We are sorry for the delay,8221; proclaim signs with December 2004 and March 2005 deadlines, which simply will not be met. At one intersection spanning the crucial road to the airport, not a worker was visible over all of the last two weeks.

Not surprisingly, rivals are now seeing great opportunity in Bangalore8217;s distress. 8216;8216;We are closely tracking developments in Bangalore after the statement by Mr Premji,8217;8217; admits West Bengal8217;s IT minister Manab Mukherjee.

At BangaloreIT.Com, Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy tried luring IT further south. Wipro Software has got itself 200 acres in Thiruvananthapuram and Infosys 50 acres. Consultant McKinsey has set up an outsourcing centre and Tata Consultancy Services is building a training centre. All this despite Kerala8217;s big problem8212;poor English skills.

In Tamil Nadu, English isn8217;t a problem. TCS has acquired 70 acres for a 20,000-strong development centre, Wipro intends to ramp up its campus to 20,000 and Infosys to 25,000. A new technology park at Hosur is only an hour8217;s drive south of Electronics City.

As for China, it seems closer than ever before.

PART II