US companies look to build bridges in India-literally

To ease traffic jams, avoid accidents in Bangalore, MNCs chip in to install footbridges, overpasses

U.S. companies are helping India’s own Silicon Valley cope with rapid growth, chipping in to build infrastructure such as footbridges and overpasses, and pushing to improve public transportation to get their employees to work safely.

The southern city of Bangalore has an educated and relatively inexpensive bounty of computer programmers, engineers and accountants, which has attracted the likes of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Intel Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. In the past two decades, its population more than doubled to reach the size of New York City—but its infrastructure hasn’t kept up.

In an attempt to ease traffic jams and avoid pedestrian accidents, large U.S. corporations are funding and even overseeing the construction of some infrastructure in loose cooperation with municipal and government agencies.

A group of companies have pooled about $70,000 to build a footbridge over a busy arterial road in Bangalore. The bridge, completed last year, is critical for getting their own staff to work safely and efficiently, they say.

Construction of a second footbridge, this one outside an office of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., is slated for later this year. The consortium pays $90,000 annually for about 30 wardens to help the city’s police manage traffic. They even hired a crane to be kept on standby for when a vehicle breaks down and needs to be removed quickly to keep traffic flowing.

The companies managed to speed up local government plans for a metro rail line that would connect offices on a portion of the city’s Outer Ring Road—a 10-mile stretch where the offices of most major international corporations are located. To get the project moving, the consortium, known as the Outer Ring Road Companies Association, provided previously unobtainable financing tools to the agency in charge of building the Bangalore metro system.

“The development of the [Ring Road] corridor has been very fast now, so we’re trying to catch up,” said Pradeep Kharola, managing director of the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Ltd.

In 2015, Bangalore’s Outer Ring Road accounted for about 20% of all office space leased in India, according to the Metro Rail Corporation. Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo & Co., Amazon.com Inc. and LinkedIn Corp. have leased office space on the stretch in the past three years.

Bangalore was a sleepy city until two decades ago. It burst into the global limelight as Indian outsourcing companies such as Infosys Ltd. and Wipro Ltd. became successful globally. Attracted partly by the lower costs, major U.S. companies, including International Business Machines Corp., Adobe Systems Inc., Cisco and J.P. Morgan, have set up large offices in the city and hired tens of thousands of people. The city is often referred to as the Silicon Valley of India.

Despite the logistical hurdles resulting from rapid growth, Bangalore remains attractive to multinationals, thanks to a large skills pool that ranges beyond software engineers to include data scientists, finance specialists and venture capitalists. “It becomes a hard place to turn away from,” said V. Bunty Bohra, chief executive of Goldman Sachs Services in India. 

U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to push U.S. companies to cut back on expanding foreign operations haven’t yet dampened the attraction of the Outer Ring Road.

Around half a million people work along it, more than twice the number a decade ago. The eight-lane road is flanked by massive office parks. One of them is RMZ Ecoworld, a complex that hosts 70,000 employees.

There is only one gate for office workers to enter and leave Ecoworld. On a recent afternoon, around 5 p.m., six traffic wardens and one traffic policeman helped manage a stream of cars, two-wheelers, mini buses, and other vehicles spilling on to the Outer Ring Road from the complex, and merging it with oncoming traffic.

An estimated 600,000 vehicles ply the Outer Ring Road during peak hours. The result: it can take an hour to cover a half mile by car. Traffic jams lead to annual productivity loss of $3 billion a year, according to an estimate by the Outer Ring Road Companies Association.

In recent years, there have been accidents as pedestrians try to cross the Ring Road, as there weren’t any foot pathways above or below the road for large stretches. A fatal accident in 2015 shook leaders of some companies, who then funded the $70,000 skywalk.

Meanwhile, traffic congestion poses security risks, given the difficulty of evacuating staff in an emergency. 

An Indian developer funded by Blackstone Group LP that runs an office park in the area has asked the city government for permission to build a traffic overpass to connect two other existing overpasses, and for permission to build ramps that will ultimately connect them to its campus.

The developer, Embassy Group, has offered to pay up to $10 million to fund the construction. The company built a foot pathway near its office park and installed a bus stop for the city’s public buses so they can bring employees to and from their office campuses. The Outer Ring Road Companies Association plans to start its own fleet of private shuttle buses operating throughout the city.

“You can’t depend on the government to do everything,” said Poorna Gudibande, honorary president of the association, whose day job is to manage regional security at Cisco.

The government welcomes companies’ initiatives, said Mahendra Jain, a senior official in the urban development department of the state of Karnataka, of which Bangalore is the capital.

“It helps them, it helps the government to take up more projects within the government’s budget,” he said.

Source: The Wall Street Journal