Bangalore: Knowledge Capital That Knows Not Its Future

There was a seemingly innocuous report buried in the columns of newspapers on the surge in demand for commercial properties in India that may have escaped your attention.
It is dismaying to old Bangaloreans to know that the city’s fair face will be only marred further by anther wave of expansion.
In calendar year 2004 alone, studies indicate that up to six million square feet of commercial properties in five happening cities will be purchased by the IT and ITES sector alone. This is out of a total demand among these five hubs of 20 million square feet.
Demand for residential properties will be in the region of a whopping thirty million square feet for just this year.
In just the first quarter of 2004 alone, up to 6.5 million square feet of commercial properties have been gobbled up by the top five IT/ITES hubs in the country—Bangalore [2 m. sft], Bombay [1.9 m. sft], Pune [1.5 m. sft], Hyderabad [0.5 m. sft] and Chennai [0.6 m. sft]. Delhi finished last with 0.4 million sq. feet for the quarter.
Supply of spaces in the organized building sector across the six cities in the year is a mere 2.5 m. sq. ft with 30 per cent coming from Mumbai alone.
Now, residential spaces are projected at about 2.5 to 3 times the commercial spaces. In Bangalore alone the demand for home spaces is at a staggering 15 m. sqft for 2004 alone.
This is No Boom
The silver lining in all this is that, happily for the buyer, this is a mature and discerning market. This is not the unbridled boom of the mid-nineties when people bought land as if the world is running out of it. Then came a disastrous plunge.
So what is driving the demand? Bangalore is by far the fastest growing city in Asia. As the knowledge capital of India, consultants are coming in by the drove. With companies hungry for quality recruitment, many thousands are coming into town for good.
Estimates suggest that 1,200–1,400 families per day are moving in permanently into Bangalore. That’s every day.
Seventy-five per cent of the IT and ITES sector is out here. And many of these middle and upper level management professionals are investing in homes. With interest rates so low, people are parking more funds into second and third homes.
Maximising Gain
Even the BDA in the city is only interested in maximising saleable spaces and floor area ratios—with disregard of the need for responsible growth and urban planning that paves the road for sustainable development.
Clearly, there is need for a new language of building; new sets of leadership initiatives—who says that you have to be permitted 50 per cent of land area as saleable? Who says that the F.A.R. for developing properties ought to be as high as 1:2.2 as it is in many of the city’s zones? And then violation of even these high attractive ratios is more the rule than the exception.
How can sanity be brought to these processes? Your guess is as good as mine. Many urban planners working on the city’s contours of the future are aware of the potential disaster in the making—be it in terms of sanitation, availability of water, or power.
Alarming Water Scenario
Today, the Bangalore Water Supply Board supplies about 350 million litres a day—against the city’s need that is upward of 750 million litres. The rest sixty per cent comes out of borewells which is alarming, to say the least.
Almost every citizen’s lament is how his borewell has run dry thanks to a neighbour gouging deeper. Average groundwater depths have plunged from 150–200 feet in the early eighties to a dismaying 400 feet. There are areas where you go 700 feet deep!
There are undying optimists who take consolation in the fact that Ahmedabad today taps groundwater at 1,000 feet! And that Mumbai needs 4,500 million liters—five times Bangalore’s need.
And to believe this was a small sleepy town of the Seventies—more known fondly by its old citizens as ‘the one-street dump’—where your piece of action was just a Saturday jaywalk on M G Road. That jaywalk has now become an impossible jostle—have you tried visiting that street on a weekend?
And then there is the first-time visitor to Bangalore who—to this day—falls instantly in love with the city, even as he lands. Its weather has held, thanks to Bangalore’s altitude and the realtive rarefied air. But for how long?
Maddening Milieu
In the maddening milieu, of construction small groups such as this one at BCIL, soldier on doggedly, knowing that they cannot change the world; but knowing, too, that they can make a difference with successful models that demonstrate the possibility of building with a soft ecological footprint—while not taking away from the resident any of those urban conveniences that we have gotten used to.
There are many well-intentioned individuals who often ask, “I have a plot and seek to build a house. Tell us how you can help with planning resources and skills.”
Write in, and we will put you on to the growing, committed band of professionals who can guide such directions.