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Journalism of Courage
Bengaluru’s infamous gridlock has once again become the talk of the town after a viral Reddit post likened the daily commute to a “hidden tax” on the residents, especially the tech workforce.
In the post, a software professional from JP Nagar broke down the real price of living and working in India’s Silicon Valley. Drawing an annual salary of Rs 28 lakh (excluding RSUs), he said he already parts with Rs 6.5 lakh as income tax and another Rs 1.4 lakh as GST on routine spending, the equivalent of over three months of work. But the more punishing cost, he argued, is time.
Although his office on Outer Ring Road sits just 14 kilometers away, the commute stretches to 90 minutes each way instead of the expected half-hour. By his own calculation, that adds up to nearly 2.5 months a year wasted in traffic. “The first two taxes were meant to build better roads, smoother commutes, and smarter cities,” he wrote. “But planning went wrong. The money often went elsewhere. Ending up paying the hidden tax, not even having time to look back and introspect.”
The post struck a nerve with Bengaluru’s professionals, who flooded the comments section with their own frustrations. One user said, “I always tell this to my team. If you put an engineer working in Bangalore in any foreign country with cleaner air and no traffic, they will become 20 per cent more efficient with no other changes. Everyone is always coughing, sneezing, wheezing and taking leave for their children falling ill but still say air pollution is not that big a deal.”
Another user pointed to the city’s breakneck growth, “You can’t build highways in a congested city like this, don’t expect Singapore-like infrastructure when people are just flooding in for jobs… Why don’t the central government offer tax free for foreign companies to invest in tier two cities, at least the population will be distributed evenly?”
Others expressed outright despair. “I don’t know until when all of us will be biching here and on other social media platforms about these issues man,” wrote one Redditor. “Even a civil war cannot fix all these issues… People don’t even know who are servants and who are masters,” another user said.
