Bengaluru, the Garden City of India; Pensioners paradise and more recently; The Silicon Valley of
India is an ever expanding, hospitable, generous giver to its people. With close to a crore living under
her, it is rather interesting how this city was called Bengaluru.
Stories say Bengaluru was named after “The town of boiled beans” as it translates from its native language Kannada, the city has evolved from Bendhakaluru to Bangalore and more recently changed to Bengaluru.
Bengaluru, situated at a higher altitude, above the sea level gave more rains, longer winters and short summers.
There would be days when the entire city faces triumphant showers and by the end of the year, a
very cold and reserve feeling making you want to grab a marshmallow dipped in coffee.
We all know that Bengaluru is called the Garden city, but why?
During the rule of the Wadiyars in 17 th century, Bengaluru was said to be the abode for Haider Ali. It
is said that he fell in love with Bengaluru’s cool breeze and mild summer that he built a garden
named after his beloved sister called “Lal Bi” which was later named as Lal Bagh Botanical Garden
that is still thriving in the city. It is not an uncommon occurrence to see an array of trees sheltering
the roads even now with the city striving hard to retain the name of Garden city that it bestowed.
The transition from Garden city of India to Silicon Valley.
Silicon valley, the name coined by the techies back in the days when Microsoft, IBM, Apple started
booming out of car garages referring to the innovative way of implementing the silicon chip thereby
opening the doors to the Information era. It took the US government billions of funds to bring up
this tech culture. A silicon valley doesn’t happen overnight and this is exactly what happened with
Bengaluru. It was a series of events from over a long period of time that incepted the formation of
Silicon Valley in India.
- Formation of Indian Institute of Science in 1909 – It was during a train commute from Chicago where the talks of starting an Indian institute for Science began between the exceptional Swami Vivekananda and the visionary JRD Tata. These talks continued to build up to an extent where Krishnadevaraya Wadiyar the fourth offered JRD Tata to take as much land as he wanted to bring up this Institute for research in his kingdom. With several backings from William Ramsey, the Nobel Prize winner for physics, the institute started functioning and flourishing under the guidance of renowned engineers like Sir M. Visveshwaraya and K.Seshadri Iyer. It was only after 1933 when Sir C.V Raman won the Nobel Prize for Physics, under whom the Institute went to great heights. This institute would fuel a centuries worth of research that will later on lead to the formation of Silicon valley similar to how Massachusetts and Stanford led the way to bring about the Silicon Valley boom in the USA.
- Formation of Industries post the Independence – The development of the Krishna Raj Sagar Dam in Mysore opened doors for the development of many industries. Bengaluru’s climate then was very hospitable and this led to large scale infrastructure development leading to the formation of National Aerospace Labs, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, Indian Space Research Organisation, Bharath Electronics, Bharath Earth Movers, Hindustan Machine Tools, Indian Telephone Industries and many other industries with Headquarters in Bengaluru.
- For close to two decades the government raised several investments to run these establishments with billions of funding pouring into Bengaluru. The pros to a large scale government investment is that, it is immune to the dynamic economic conditions and this sustained public investment created a large workforce and a web-pool of knowledge that was later tapped by tech companies.
- Information Technology comes to Bengaluru : When the rest of India was cheering for their victory in the World Cup in 1983,Narayan Murthy moved his business of developing IBM frameworks from Pune to Bengaluru, right about when Azim Premji developed his own software subsidiary in Bengaluru. These snail pace development then led to the outsourcing culture by late 1989 making GE to establish their first outsourcing office in Bengaluru and then the floodgates opened and we never looked back. Bengaluru currently is the outsourcing hub for most of the MNC’s with a backbone of $60.5 billion.
- Start-up culture – Year 2000 problems, Dot com crash and many other factors led to a returning pool of unemployed engineers seeded a round of new startups- who started exploring things beyond outsourcing. Many expats once employed by Internet giants like Amazon, went on to find Flipkart in Bengaluru and with the advent of InMobi, the mobile ad network, Flipkart and InMobi did to Bengaluru what Amazon and Paypal did to Silicon Valley.
In the recent study done by World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Bengaluru has been
ranked the most dynamic city in the world. http://www.jll.com/cities-research/City-Momentum
Bengaluru was ranked 12th in 2015 and 4th in 2016.
Now it has claimed the top spot in the world for 2017. The index has 42 ingredients across three key
areas; socio-economic factors including:
- GDP, population, air passengers, corporate headquarters and foreign direct investment account for 40% of the ranking.
- Commercial real estate momentum measured through changes related to construction, rents, investment and transparency in the office, retail and hotel sectors accounts for another 30%.
- Innovation capacity and technological prowess, access to education and environmental quality accounts for the remaining 30% of the index.
With all this development and IT boom we do forget about an intangible matter. Our garden city.
The exponential rise in lifestyle, culture and technology has made us blind toward the onslaught of
the millions of trees that were an integral part of Bengaluru. We can cure cancer, we can send
people to Mars and yet if we do not have the ability to appreciate the greenery around us we should
be prepared to get vilified by it.
It is imperative to bring about the gardening culture among every one of us. Being called the most
dynamic city in the world came to us for a cost. The cost of those silent trees that were maimed to
pave way to them skyscraper’s. We have achieved what our city had aimed for, now it’s time to
collect those bits and pieces that were tarnished and overlooked in our greed and reconstruct a
SO what should one do to save Bangalore?
- Start by segregating your waste and putting a composter in your house to process wet waste into manure.
- Say no to disposable plastic – bottles, wrappers, glasses, packaging, cutlery, straws etc.
- Grow your own food – www.facebook.com/growsharesustain
- Plant more trees – don’t throw the seeds of the fruits you eat – save them & plant them in free land around you
- Get free saplings by BBMP and plant them – https://goo.gl/8jno0v
- Do rain water harvesting at your house.
- Shift to sustainable products made from bamboo – http://www.bambooindia.com/