Every year for the past five years Bangalore/Bengaluru (pop.14 million), globally recognized as India’s digital technologies epicentre and ICT (information communication technologies) hub, has experienced severe eve-of-monsoon and monsoon rain and flooding. This year is no different. At time of writing, pre-monsoon showers have severely disrupted road traffic, damaged residential and office property and prompted mass workplace absenteeism. The annual damage by way of work and property loss due to rain and flooding is colossal.
Moreover since Bengaluru is the national ICT hub with income from digital services exported to countries and corporates worldwide estimated at $53 billion (Rs.4.5 lakh crore) per year, this annual calamity is inflicting incremental reputation loss upon tech companies sited in this misgoverned metropolis. According to ICT industry sources, Hyderabad, Telangana — blessed with talented engineers and superior civic governance — is fast emerging as a preferable alternative for international tech companies.
The official excuse is that the Garden City which at the turn of the new millennium hosted a population of 5.5 million has grown too large and too fast. In particular, the number of automotive vehicles has multiplied manifold, imposing a load that its road network which has expanded inadequately over the past three decades, is unable to bear. Moreover the mushrooming of concrete residential colonies and office blocks has imposed a heavy burden on the city’s storm water drainage and sewage disposal systems.
While there is some substance in this rationalisation, it’s axiomatic that planning and management of a metropolis of over 10 million requires high calibre civic planning, management and engineering personnel. Yet dipstick testing of officials in urban planning and development, and related services in government and municipal departments is likely to reveal that managers and technicians are under-qualified. According to the India Skills Report 2024, 54 percent of graduates of India’s engineering institutions are functionally uneducated and unfit for employment in corporate or government service. Not a few of these half-baked civic managers and engineers, equipped with certification recklessly issued by (state) government and low-ranked colleges, with poor quality faculty, are employed in government and BMC through fair means or foul, usually the latter.
The solution to the civic chaos and chronic mismanagement of India’s cities is for the educated middle class to exert pressure on the Centre and states to give teeth to the 74th constitutional amendment to decentralize civic governance down to the ward level. It’s also important to restrict ward elections to local property owners. Simultaneously all government and corporation engineers should be mandated to pass an independent skills assessment and eligibility test akin to TET (teacher eligibility test) prior to promotion. In ‘soft state’ India these are hard solutions. But the national interest demands that painful nettles are grasped.
