Traffic jams have long replaced the fine weather as Bengaluru's conversation starter, but one never thought a day would come when the technology hub would be discussed in terms of being, well, ‘Bangalored'. The verb “Bangalored” became popular about two decades ago when global giants arrived in droves to hire techies in the city. Globally, the term referred to someone losing a job in an advanced economy because a position had been outsourced to another country, usually India, because costs were lower.
When I lived in Bangalore for a few years as a correspondent for a leading international news agency, I used to mull on what might happen to the city in the future, thinking of cities and industries I have seen decay, such as jute-rich Kolkata and the textile town of Kanpur.
Bengaluru is far from that, but in an ironic twist of fate, the city is facing plenty of problems created by a problem of plenty!
Not A New Debate
Recent social media tussles between politicians like Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar and business leaders like Kiran Mazumdar Shaw over the city's creaking infrastructure and piles of garbage have been compounded by the announcement that Alphabet-owned Google will set up a $15 million data centre at Visakhapatnam in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh. Tongues wagged in a manner that suggested that Bengaluru itself was being Bangalored as investors moved elsewhere.
That only reminds me of Mark Twain's famous quote about rumours of his death being greatly exaggerated. Fact-checks as well as historical context are required to set things in order, because both Bengaluru and the technology industry have a complicated ecosystem that calls for a nuanced perspective.
From Horses To Motorcars
Kamaraj Road, running from the head of the city's fashionable Brigade Road, used to be called Cavalry Road, symbolising how a street meant for horses now pulls in wide-bodied luxury cars. In the language of the information technology industry, the traffic issues began with a bandwidth problem, and were compounded by the fact that infrastructure did not drive growth but had to catch up for it, much like downloading a broadband-era video file on a slow dial-up connection.
My first story on the then-Bangalore's technology boom in the mid-1990s began by contrasting the potholes on Hosur Road on the way to the sprawling Infosys campus with the huge dish antennae pointing skywards in a satellite-aided software export industry. A few years later, the company's chairman, NR Narayana Murthy was part of a rare protest by corporate executives seeking better roads. Cribbing about the city's infrastructure has been a regular occurrence since then, but the visitors and investors can't have enough of Bengaluru. This is because an international company's HR head often worries more about where to get the next 100 highly educated techies rather than traffic jams or garbage. Bengaluru is still the go-to hub for tech hires.
The Politician's Karnataka
The city has indeed come a long way since my days, but we do run now and then into political problems. I learnt during my years in the city that Karnataka is India's second most arid state after Rajasthan, which contrasts with Bengaluru's moniker as India's Garden City. This is because the state capital is at the deep south end of the state, while a good deal of a state politician's mind is worried about rural votes that are not directly linked to tech-driven urban growth.
Now comes a scare from both rival states and artificial intelligence (AI) that threatens to take software jobs away as coding and much else associated with the industry gets automated, alongside the fears that investors like Google are preferring locations elsewhere.
While there is a fiscal policy debate about cheap land and other incentives being offered by Andhra Pradesh's Telugu Desam Party (TDP) government, there is also the fact that AI data centres guzzle water and electricity by the tonnes, which may make things environmentally affordable for one state but not for another. But the whole debate, framed as a Karnataka vs Others issue, may be misplaced. The very nature of bandwidth-driven technologies supporting the Internet is such that hardware, software, and the services they generate may rest in three separate places in a connected world. In simple words, Google's Vizag centre may well spawn as many jobs in Bengaluru as in Vizag itself, if not more.
The Thing About The AI Boom
There is also the less-discussed fact about AI itself, as much of the current conversation is about large language models (LLMs) like GPT, Grok, Gemini and Claude 3 (Anthropic). While jobs are certainly being replaced by models that generate software codes or neat analytical paragraphs, there is also a born-again boom emerging in “agentic AI” or small language models.
Agentic AI involves autonomous pieces of technology that plan, act, and adapt, using LLMs with tools and other capabilities to help workflows, especially in the corporate sector that pays money to boost efficiency. Small language models (SLMs) are like boutiques that perform natural language tasks efficiently, with fewer resources than LLMs.
As the industry moves to build, run, and serve these new-age developments, Indian companies are expected to become fashionable again. Having seen the dotcom boom and bust circa 2000, followed by a mobile app-led resurgence, as also a BPO (business process outsourcing) explosion that grew from vanilla call centres to global capability centres (GCCs), I see a surge after the current AI purge.
Think Big, Dear Techbros
All that is no excuse for choked roads or garbage piles in Bengaluru, which need urgent action. But this might be the right time for Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh to work together rather than act as rivals by locating themselves in a world that stands at the cusp of a new growth wave.
Tamil Nadu is pushing ahead with a plan to build a new airport near Hosur, which is barely 30 km from the Electronic City that houses the Infosys campus. The Andhra Pradesh border and Anantapur town are only 200 km away from Bengaluru - and in the age of eight-lane highways and bullet trains, the distance is not huge at all.
Policy-makers in Bengaluru would do well to look at a tri-state future, taking a leaf out of New York State's playbook that includes the states of New Jersey and Connecticut. A shift from inter-state rivalries to creative collaboration will add real geographical bandwidth to match communication bandwidth. A would-be Bengaluru Technology Region (BTR) sounds more engaging than social media spats over garbage and blocked roads. Imagination is now the problem, not lack of money.
(Madhavan Narayanan is a senior editor, writer and columnist with more than 30 years of experience, having worked for Reuters, The Economic Times, Business Standard, and Hindustan Times after starting out in the Times of India Group.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
