Bangalore woos foreign capital for face-lift
Overcrowded and desperate for infrastructure improvements, city solicits investment, chides government lethargy.
The government plans to build new elevated highways, widen existing roads, develop satellite towns and set up a $1.4 billion mass transit system in the city, home to more than 1,500 technology firms.
But IT industry officials said on Friday the government needs to speed up the projects and plan many more initiatives to sustain growth in India's Silicon Valley.
"We will encourage foreign investment in all areas of infrastructure building in and around Bangalore. Immediate approvals will be granted to all such investment proposals," Karnataka Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy told Reuters.
He said the state would issue a global tender next month to build five satellite townships in a radius of 30 miles of Bangalore, the capital of the southern Karnataka state.
But investors may be discouraged by an ongoing dispute between the state government and a consortium that is building an expressway from Bangalore to Mysore, 70 miles away.
The state government has accused the consortium of buying more land than necessary for the $600 million project to build the road, industrial hubs and new townships.
Ashok Kheny, managing director of the Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprise consortium, denied the allegation saying such controversy would be a setback for new private investment.
Bangalore boasts large facilities of global firms such as Microsoft, Intel and IBM but its rapid growth has led to traffic jams on potholed roads, overcrowded public transport and irregular power supply.
"Bangalore, which is essentially a brand that has been created painfully in the last so many years, is fast disappearing," said Rajendra Misra, managing director of private equity firm Tenet Holdings Private.
Tranquility just a memory
Misra, a member of an official panel set up to improve the city, said authorities had ignored infrastructure for too long.
"They (the government) are killing a golden goose."
Technology firms, which have helped transform a tranquil city into a buzzing metropolis of 6.5 million people that makes up a third of India's $23 billion software and back-office service industry, say Bangalore needs large investments.
"The new infrastructure initiatives will certainly help but we need many more projects like these," said Sunil Mehta, vice president of the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM).
Bangalore now competes with other Indian cities such as Hyderabad in the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh.
On Monday, the world's largest wealth manager, UBS AG, began back-office operations in Hyderabad, where Franklin Templeton is setting up a unit and Microsoft also has facilities.
Tata Consultancy Services, India's top software services exporter, said earlier this month it plans to invest 5 billion rupees ($108 million) in a new software development center in the western Indian city of Pune.
Industry officials say they are keenly watching the progress of other projects such as a new highway connecting the city to the Electronics City, which houses 150 firms including India's second-largest software services firm, Infosys Technologies, and its smaller rival, Wipro.
"We are getting good signals from the government. We need to have good governance and good project management to see the faster implementation of all these projects," said Anant Koppar, president of MphasiS BFL's technologies division.