City of gardens, pensioners' paradise, serene lakes... ask any old timer and he will talk of Bangalore as the city that was.

Rarely does a city with a salubrious climate, friendly people, huge gardens, reputed educational institutions, defence establishments and a peaceful atmosphere retain its charm for long. That Bangalore did for nearly four decades after India's Independence Aug 15, 1947, is an achievement of sorts.

Today much of its charms have faded as it hurtles into the future as India's IT capital and one of Asia's fastest rising cities.

Sixty years ago, the city's population was less than 700,000. Now it is bursting at the seams with a population of nearly seven million.

In the early 1990s, the number of private vehicles on the city's roads was less than 700,000. By the end of 2004, it had crossed 2.1 million and in the last three years it has added another million-and-a-half.

The state-owned Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation daily deploys 4,800 buses that make over 65,000 trips carrying 3.7 million passengers.

The main city railway station handles several hundred thousand arriving and departing passengers a day and the small airport has nearly 300 flights landing and taking off daily, catering to more than eight million travellers a year.

The scorching pace of growth is taking a heavy toll of amenities like good roads, adequate and quality drinking water and uninterrupted and quality power supply. The lakes have shrunk and the dry land been occupied.

"Of late Bangalore has been facing serious problems on the infrastructure front, making it a victim of its own success," sums up Kiran Karnik, president of India's IT body Nasscom.

"Failing to keep pace with the industry's growth or that of the city in terms of influx and expansion, the existing infrastructure and civic amenities have been under severe strain, crumbling under pressure and leading to traffic chaos and shortages of water, housing and public transport," Karnik told IANS.

The city's reputation as peaceful was also shaken by a terrorist attack in December 2005 at the hallowed Indian Institute of Science (IISc) that claimed the life of a retired professor from Delhi.

The terrorism link did not end there. The city is now struggling to get over the impact of three of its youth - two medical doctors and an engineer - being implicated in the British terror plot.

But Bangalore has been cosmopolitan by nature, home to people who have Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Urdu as their mother tongue. British rule brought English and Hindi was popularised not by films alone but also the vigorous efforts of Dakshin Bharath Hindi Prachar Sabha.

The setting up of defence establishments like Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) and Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL), telephone maker Indian Telephone Industries Ltd (ITI) and machine tools maker Hindustan Machine Tools Ltd (HMT) brought in hordes of Malayalis to the city in the early years of Independence.

For generations Marwaris and Rajasthanis have been here. The IT boom and the resultant construction activity are now attracting semi-skilled and unskilled labourers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh as well.

But the phenomenal growth in the number of humans as well as automobiles is taking its toll.

Greenery is one of the casualties. Today air-conditioning is a necessity, at least in offices, in a city that had earned the sobriquet of a naturally air-conditioned paradise.

It's hard to imagine today that in the first four decades of Independence the city had an accessibility problem. There was no direct train even to Delhi from Bangalore till the late 1970s.

In the 1990s and the first few years of this decade, the railways used to run special trains from as far as Kolkata to transport to Bangalore thousands of students to appear for the Common Entrance Test (CET) conducted by the Karnataka government for admission to engineering and medical courses.

Of course, now there are direct trains from Bangalore to Jodhpur in Rajasthan and Guwahati, the principal city of Assam.

Perhaps the first few batches of the students from all over India who came to Karnataka to become engineers and doctors can take credit or blame for heralding the beginning of the end of Bangalore as the pensioners' paradise.

House and room rents went up, there were more people with money to splurge, a younger crowd away from home and eating out meant restaurants enlarging their menu to offer North Indian dishes, chaat, Mumbai-ka bhel puri and of course Chinese fried rice and noodles and gobi manchurian.

The World Wide Web also changed the face of the city forever. The city is as much known for home grown IT czar N.R. Narayana Murthy as it is for Azim Premji who traces his roots to Kutch in faraway Gujarat.

It opened the doors to Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, IBM, GE, Novell, Fujitsu, Siemens, Deutsche Bank, Motorola, Citicorp and VeriFone, to name a few big-ticket firms that have set up shop for software development to backroom operations.

These firms attracted young job seekers from all over India. The comparably high salaries they offered at the entry level opened up a market for branded goods - from Marks and Spencer's, Louise Philippe, Peter England, Reebok, Nike, Sony, Toshiba to Nokia and Ericsson everyone made Bangalore a must in their selling plan.

With a young crowd willing to splurge, it was only a matter of time for multiplexes and pubs to follow.

The city is also home to Capt C.R. Gopinath who changed the face of India's aviation industry with his no-frills Air Deccan airline because of which many millions of Indians were able to fly for the first time in their life.

A young, moneyed crowd has made Bangalore a must visit for all the famous Western rock bands and crowds of up to 50,000 throng these concerts.

Along with this modern lifestyle, traditional Carnatic and Hindustani music concerts continue through the year though the number of people attending them is no longer as it used to be till the late 1970s.

The exponential growth in the population and the number of vehicles plying on the roads means longer travel time, as not all roads are broad. The city is full of one-ways forcing one to drive several kilometres more even when the destination is just a kilometre away.

A dozen flyovers and an equal number of road underpasses have come up in the last decade but they have not had much impact on easing the traffic snarls as more and more vehicles and people are on the road every day.

Says Karnik: "As a result, the IT industry's efficiency and productivity have been affected due to loss of time in commutation and connectivity. The stakeholders have to move quickly to tackle the infrastructure bottlenecks though a beginning has been made with ring roads, flyovers, peripheral roads and a new international airport on the outskirts of the city." 

August 10, 2007

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