Making Beta Bengaluru a supercluster

In an earlier article, I had written how Bengaluru was the first city in Asia to get electrified, had a great PSU and college ecosystem. It was always a city with great potential. It was blessed by forward looking politicians. The first was probably M. Visvesvaraya, Dewan of Mysore from 1912 to 1918, the great engineering genius, who designed the KRS Dam that powered the Brindavan Gardens. Devaraj Urs, who became Chief Minister in 1972, had a goal of “having an electric bulb in every house”, unheard of at that time. Urs filled his cabinet with technocrats and set up the famous Electronic City. He spearheaded land reforms and schemes for the backward classes. S Bangarappa in the early 1990s set the stage for Bengaluru to become a Silicon Valley. SM Krishna from 1998-2004 made Karnataka the leader in digital governance.

In the last 20 years, there have been 12 swearing-in ceremonies for the Chief Minister’s post. You can imagine the instability. Bengaluru has been drifting. There have been a slew of projects getting announced. Few take off and if they do, they meander and create a nuisance. Just when you think Bengaluru traffic is in the pits, the next year gets even worse. Everywhere you go are dug up roads, under construction ventures, unfinished projects and an unending obstacle course. Bengaluru has been called a perpetual Beta City: A strange version of a city that is in a pre-release stage with multiple bugs where we Bengalurians are the alpha testers. The problem is that there is no release date.

The reason for that is there is just one agency that looks at all these problems and that’s the BBMP. One corporation cannot handle a city like Bengaluru.

Oh, those superclusters!

Other major cities don’t face such problems. Take Delhi, which in fact is NCR. This consists of Delhi, Noida, Ghaziabad, Gurgaon and Faridabad. That’s 5 municipalities! Lutyens Delhi is run separately. The central government along with the governments of Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana have a say in running NCR. NCR has a problem of plenty and an excess of governance. And it shows. By Indian standards, the infrastructure of NCR is fantastic.

The same is the case with Mumbai. By population, Mumbai is the largest city in India. But its suburbs are not small either. Thane is in the Top 15 largest cities and both Kalyan-Dombivli and Vasai-Virar in the Top 30. On top of that you now have Navi Mumbai. Next to that they are developing NAINA (Navi Mumbai Airport Influence Notified Area). Howzat for a real supercluster! While Hyderabad and Pune may not be superclusters, the former has the twin city Secunderabad, and the latter has Pimpri-Chinchwad.

Hope for Bengaluru

Which brings us back to Bengaluru. Ideally one should convert Bengaluru into a union territory and make Mysore the capital of Karnataka. But this would be politically difficult.

Maybe the next best thing is the Greater Bengaluru Governance Bill, 2024 which plans to break the BBMP into three parts and there is a provision of a total of seven corporations (will they really do the latter?). 

Why is that necessary? Giving you an idea about the size of Bengaluru, north to south, the distance from airport to Biocon headquarters is 60km. West to East, Peenya Industrial Park to Whitefield is 40km. You may not get these distances in Delhi and Bombay proper, but only when you include the superclusters. The interesting part is that while Mumbai and Delhi have space constraints, Bengaluru can keep on expanding in all four directions. Theoretically its possible for it to surpass global cities like London.

But not with the current dispensations. The life of Bengalurians is groaning under the pressure of inadequate infrastructure and unfinished projects. With the right leadership, Bengaluru has the potential to become the foremost city in the world. And who knows, maybe surpass America’s Silicon Valley! A supercluster of 7 corporations would probably be a good first step in that direction.