The Republic of Builders

Bangalore is choking thanks to its growing band of realtor-politicians

On election duty last week in Karnataka, I discovered how little I knew about the fast-changing city in which I had spent every summer vacation of my misspent youth. My cousins and I rarely left the bubble of Bangalore Cantonment, venturing no further afield than Commercial Street. But the real action today is in the outer precincts, where we had come to meet the rising tribe of builder-MLAs that seems ready to overtake the dominance of the mining lobby in the Karnataka Assembly. Most of these realtors are first- or second-timers to politics, like Prabhakar Reddy of Sai Realtors, which according to its website specialises in gated townships, and is now the Janata Dal (Secular) candidate from Bangalore South. Or Uday Garudachar, who runs Bangalore's Garuda Malls chain, now the BJP candidate from Chickpet. Or Nandiesh Reddy, another township developer, fighting on a BJP ticket in Krishnarajapuram in east Bangalore. Or Priya Krishna, who runs the real estate empire of his father, veteran Congressman M Krishnappa (known as Layout Krishnappa, in recognition of the many "layouts" or housing townships he has developed on the peripheries), now the Congress candidate from Govindraj Nagar in west Bangalore.

There was indignation when I suggested to them that packing Assemblies and Cabinets with so many realtors doesn't bode well for the city. They say they have joined politics to "perform social service".

Except that the legacy of the outgoing band of "social workers" is visible to anyone who drives through Bangalore: choked roads, every available open space turned into a construction site, buildings that seem to have exploited every loophole of building bye-laws.

For turning Bangalore into an urban dystopia, experts lay much of the blame on the large presence of politicians with real estate interests in the Assembly (12 directly, but add MLAs and ministers from other business interests - mining, sugar, power - who play the realty market and the number is much higher).

In 2011, former Additional Chief Secretary V Balasubramanian, who headed a committee to investigate the encroachment of public land, found that open spaces held by the Bangalore Development Authority had shrunk from 3,000 to 1,000 acres. He says the Land Revenue Act has enough provisions for tough action against encroachers and colluding officials, but is never enforced because of the "symbiotic relationship between builders, politicians, and the city bureaucracy".

To make his point, he has printed on the cover of his report a photograph of the offices of information technology companies built on the Byrasandra Lake bed, which has reduced the lake bed by half. But because some buildings are owned by the son-in-law of an ex-chief minister, there has been no action.

His report was rejected. Not necessarily for its cover or title ("Greed and Connivance"), but because it was handed over to then Karnataka Revenue Minister Karunakara Reddy, whose brother is serving jail time for the Bellary mining scam.

Will the builder-candidates entering the new Assembly promise to be any different? The following examples suggest otherwise:

Exhibit 1: Last year, Deccan Herald reported that in 2006-07, the district administration found that a certain N Gurumurthy Reddy falsified records to acquire land in Chinapanahalli. The plot was actually the portion of the (dried-up) lake by the same name! The land was sold onwards, but no action was taken. The report speculates that this might be because Reddy is the father of BJP MLA Nandiesh Reddy, who was developing a project abutting the same lake bed.

Exhibit 2: In 2006, the Bangalore municipality signed an agreement with Maverick Holdings, run by BJP candidate Uday Garudachar, to rehouse the Ejipura slum, a cluster of about 1,500 shanties in upmarket Koramangala. Maverick would develop homes for Ejipura residents on half the plot, in return for which it would get the other half for a commercial-cum-recreational complex. Matters got complicated because of the presence of "encroachers" or late arrivals to the slum. A legal battle ensued. The court ruled that the original Ejipura residents could choose one of two options: a one-off payment of Rs 30,000 as rent till they were rehoused, or temporary housing in the suburbs. As they debated, the court deadline lapsed and the bulldozers moved in. Ejipura has been laid waste, its residents consigned to Koramangala's pavements.

Garudachar said the payments were made, both the Rs 30,000 to the original residents, and another Rs 10,000 to the "encroachers" on "humanitarian grounds". I asked him whether it's possible for families to survive on rents of that amount in Bangalore for one-and-a-half years. His answer: "They are living in tin shacks. They could always shift that tin shack to some other locality for a period of about a year and a half."

Ejipura's homeless also knocked on the door of their MLA, N A Harris of the Congress. But Harris, himself a wealthy builder with a string of hotels, says those living in pavements are the "anti-group", and that "they are only there in the daytime, they are just doing drama, they are not people who have really suffered".

The view from Ejipura of what the impending elections holds for Bangalore is bleak, but telling: a city choking because of its inability to act against encroachers, but which has no qualms about acting against its most vulnerable residents.

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The writer anchors the ground reportage show Truth vs Hype on NDTV 24X7