Beyond Bengaluru

North Karnataka, with its entrepreneurs and engineering talent, has a culture of sharing resources to tap opportunities. But infrastructure woes hobble meaningful growth

- Kunal Talgeri

Last August, when Sohan Maheshwar, an Alexa Evangelist at Amazon, organised an Alexathon in Hubballi, a city in north Karnataka, something unexpected happened. Alexathons are workshops where student developers and startup teams develop ‘skills’ (the equivalent of apps) for Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant that powers voice interactions, podcasts and audiobooks on its Echo speakers. The turnout at the Deshpande Foundation’s Sandbox Startups in Hubballi, with 200 attendees coming from nearby districts in Karnataka, Maharashtra and Telangana, was double the usual number of attendees at Alexathons held in other cities. It even outnumbered the turnout in the metros.

If Hubballi (erstwhile Hubli) outdid all other cities, it is because of its innate ability to produce and attract young engineers from surrounding districts and states. It is also because of the geographic quirks of north Karnataka, with the shared history of cities like Hubballi, Dharwad, Belagavi, Haveri and Koppal. That’s what makes the growth prospects of north Karnataka complicated.

Engineering Legacy

Since 1962, Hubballi has been one half of Hubballi-Dharwad, Karnataka’s second-largest city, after Bengaluru. Like Belagavi (or Belgaum) located just over two hours away, Hubballi has a rich tradition of manufacturing, while Dharwad has evolved into an academic and education centre. “Dharwad was at the southern tip of Maharashtra in pre-independent India, when the town was part of Bombay state,” says Anil G Mudbidri, sociology professor and author of The Town and The Raj: Urbanization in British India.