Bengaluru in gridlock

State of Play

The tech industry in Bengaluru is once again upset about the city’s crumbling roads, chronic traffic congestion, and infrastructure gaps.

The recent monsoon rains have worsened the situation, leaving the roads full of potholes. Commuting in the city is such a Herculean task that in September, the CEO of a logistics firm located on the Outer Ring Road (ORR), a majorly congested 17-kilometre tech corridor of the city, announced plans to relocate.

Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister and Bengaluru Development Minister D.K. Shivakumar promised to set things right, but also asked the industry not to “blackmail the government”. The statement drew so much ire that it forced Chief Minister Siddaramaiah to step in and control the damage. The CEO then clarified that the firm was relocating out of ORR and not out of Bengaluru.

The focus is now on easing congestion on the ORR. A ‘Namma Metro’ line on ORR — a 58.19-km-long Blue Line between Silk Board and the airport — is expected to be completed by December 2027 and provide some relief in the long term. However, its ongoing construction has only aggravated the situation. Also, companies have instructed employees to return to offices, compounding the problem.

In a desperate bid to ease congestion, Mr. Siddaramaiah wrote to Wipro founder Azim Premji, requesting him to open a link road through the company’s campus to allow limited traffic. He cited a Bengaluru Traffic Police study that said opening the road would reduce congestion on ORR by 38% during peak hours. Mr. Premji turned down the request.

The Chief Minister’s unusual request illustrates the problem of Bengaluru’s tech corridor. The exponential growth of the city, led by market forces, was unplanned. The government has been playing catch-up with infrastructure for decades now. The ORR and the areas around it are only partially serviced by piped water, a sewerage network, and metro trains. The road network in these areas is sparse. Data from the Brand Bengaluru Committee show that the density of the road network in planned core city areas such as Jayanagar and Vijaynagar is over 25 km/sqkm, while it is as low as 8 km/sqkm in Whitefield, the heart of the tech corridor in the city. Areas along the tech corridor (ORR) have very low road density. Retrofitting these areas with new roads and a robust public mass transit system can solve the problem, but land acquisition costs have deterred the government from developing new roads.

Mr. Shivakumar has been on a mission to add to the road network of the city — a 40-km twin tunnel project cutting across the city, a 67-km Peripheral Ring Road, a 114 km Elevated Corridor project, which includes grade separators at 17 key locations, and 300-km of roads in the buffer zones of stormwater drains. Metro stretches and double decker flyovers are also being planned. All of these will cost over ₹1 lakh crore, which will be funded through loans.

However, civic activists and transport experts have protested against these big-ticket projects. They have raised doubts over their feasibility and argued for investments in public transport instead. The Bengaluru Suburban Rail Project has, for instance, failed to take off and seems to be stuck in a turf war between the Centre and the State.

Bengaluru has always suffered from unplanned growth and piecemeal planning along with a lopsided preference to develop infrastructure for private transport. Now, with Bengaluru’s governance structure revamped with the new Greater Bengaluru Governance Act, 2024, the city has the opportunity to course-correct. Under the new law, all the parastatal agencies working in the city have, for the first time, been brought on one platform under the Chief Minister. This will make holistic planning and coordinated implementation possible in real terms for the first time. The city’s erstwhile civic body has been divided into five; this will hopefully take civic governance nearer to citizens. The Revised Master Plan-2041 is also being prepared, although after a delay of more than a decade.

However, as things stand today, the city cannot start afresh on a clean slate, since projects worth over ₹1 lakh crore remain pending. This essentially means that citizens will have to put up with more dug up roads in the immediate future.