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The city at the heart of India's booming information-technology industry is already choking on its own success; but the boom has barely begun
THE arriving businessman, anxious to get to grips with India's information-technology industry in its very capital, may need a little patience. He might meet his first traffic jam just outside Bangalore's airport. He can examine the skeleton of the early stages of a planned flyover on the airport road. Construction started in February 2003 and was due to be completed in April 2004. Three-quarters of the work is still to be done, but the building site is idle. A dispute over cost escalation led to a cancellation of the contract (the rusting steel that forms the skeleton was getting more expensive by the day).
To say the least, this is bad public relations for Bangalore, the hub of the great Indian boom in software and remote services, such as call-centres (known as "business process outsourcing", or BPO). It seems to confirm recent scare stories that the city has ground to a halt, and its government does not care. Late last year, some of the leading lights of Indian information technology (IT), such as Wipro's founder, Azim Premji, and his counterpart at Infosys, Narayana Murthy, gave warning that Bangalore was in trouble. The Indian Express, a national newspaper, took up the cause with a front-page series on "Bangalore crumbling".
Elections last May in the state of Karnataka, of which Bangalore is the capital, were taken as a rebuff for the urban elite from the poor rural majority. After a series of failed monsoons, farmers were suffering. Driven into the grip of usurious money-lenders, more than 700 had killed themselves in the year before the elections. So the new administration, under its chief minister, Dharam Singh, a portly grass-roots politician who prides himself on his common touch, forswore the "urban bias" of its predecessor.
The city soon felt the pain of the government's inattention. "As companies we have scaled up," says Bob Hoekstra, boss of a big Bangalore software centre for Philips, a Dutch consumer-electronics giant. "But the government has scaled down." Bangalore's infrastructure was already creaking after years of breakneck expansion. Yet foreign firms were continuing to pour in at the rate of...