The city has a last chance to rejuvenate itself. If it loses this one, it will be good bye to the dreams of a million people and that of the founders and the entrepreneurs who have made this city what it is today.
The Indian Institute of Science has shown enough evidence that Bangalore is slipping and can become unliveable in the next five years. Should we start writing the obituary of the IT capital, knowledge capital, start-up capital, R&D capital of India? Will it become a ghost town in ten years?
Enough analysis and reports have gone into what is wrong and what can be done. Several bodies have been constituted with little impact. The government revived the once effective Bangalore Action Task Force which has the who’s who of Bangalore in it. But the way the state government is going about, it doesn’t look like it is serious. For instance, the Metropolitan Task Force (MPC), a constitutional body, is deliberately made defunct.
The politicians and state governments in Karnataka have used Bangalore as a sponge to soak out the wealth it has been creating since the last twenty years. Despite the politicians’ and bureaucrats’ greed and ineptness, the city’s entrepreneurs have braved them but it looks like they are fed up.
Bangalore has reached a stage where only game-changing solutions can help reverse the trend. And these have to be implemented within one or two years. These could be:
Start sub-urban railway system to decongest the city. Basic infrastructure is already there. Why the delay?
Adopt massive urban forestry with native plants and trees
Put all tenders on e-auction
Incinerators for burning waste. Waste cannot be dumped any more
This story is from the June 2016 edition of Sustainability Next.
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This story is from the June 2016 edition of Sustainability Next.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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