The drive to Delhi's international airport and flight were perfectly smooth; the trouble was the nightmarish slow crawl of traffic from Bangalore airport to its periphery, the heartland of the country's IT and BPO industry. Last year, due to give an evening talk at the Indian Institute of Management, also located in south Bangalore, my progress was further impeded by mild rain. On arrival I found a chunk of my audience had disappeared for dinner.
Vikram Sampath, the leading light of the Bangalore literature festival, had to move his show to Electronics City last month because of lack of public space in the city to accommodate a growing audience. The lit fest, starring a gamut from Sri Sri Ravi Shankar to Farhan Akhtar, had one drawback: the distance. Aficionados had to book weekends in outlying hotels to avoid the killing commute. "It is as if the heart of Bangalore has been ripped out," Mr Sampath said later.
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Once graceful, green and temperate, Bangalore's fall has been the most precipitous among Indian metros. The city centre lies buried in a snarling mass of traffic jams and its old architecture is obscured by unplanned high-rises or incomplete public projects. Much of its canopy of trees is gone. Namma Metro, inaugurated two years ago, is stuck at 6.4 km, delays and mounting costs exacerbated by technical aberrations, administrative changes (three managing directors in five years) or controversies over removing a statue of B R Ambedkar en route. The highway to the new airport was already inadequate to support the growth in traffic when completed; puncturing it at intervals, incomplete pylons of flyovers today stand like symbols of Bangalore's collapsed infrastructure.
You can sense the frustration and anger when you speak to the city's denizens. "Democracy is a system of competitive lobbies. Every group has its own lobby of class, caste, religion and region but there was no lobby for Bangalore's educated middle class," says T V Mohandas Pai, former Infosys director and head of Manipal Global Education. Reflecting a groundswell of such opinion, Karnataka threw out a corrupt and slothful Bharatiya Janata Party-lead coalition to give the Congress an absolute majority in May.
The state election also gave Bangalore Political Action Committee (B.PAC), a citizens' collective for better governance, a new image: it endorsed 14 candidates in the city's 28 constituencies after extensive background checks conducted by the National Law School. Only five won (B.PAC rewarded winners with token contributions of Rs 5 lakh), but it enthused disengaged citizens to demand performance and delivery.
Composed of prominent Bangaloreans, B.PAC's most passionate advocate is Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw of Biocon. Appalled by the inexorable slide of the city she grew up in, she is propelling the B.PAC group to commission technical studies, conduct leadership training programmes and come up with tender-sure models of standardised roads, built in public-private partnership, to eliminate corruption and delay.
Among Ms Mazumdar-Shaw's and B.PAC's detailed proposals is to give back Bangalore a city centre by restructuring and reviving the 200-acre Cubbon Park as a major recreational and performance space. Having studied plans for Hyde Park and Central Park in London and New York, B.PAC found a comparable model in the redevelopment of New Orleans' city park after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. The elaborate plan includes creating botanical gardens, expanses of lawn, a pedestrianised, vehicle parking periphery and sporting facilities. "Cubbon Park had anine-hole golf course in the 1950s. What happened to it?" asks Ms Mazumdar-Shaw. Cubbon Park houses several heritage buildings, such as the imposing Central Public Library, which could host events such as the lit fest and become important revenue earners. "Don't even go in there. It's scary," she warns.
If - and it is a big if - the proposal is implemented, B.PAC promises to finalise plans in 2013 and unveil the project next year. If Delhi can accomplish the restoration of Humayun's Tomb and its environs, why not Cubbon Park? Can the good people of Bangalore put the heart back in their city?