Tackling Bengaluru’s infra challenges: A CEO debate

All of the above, and more, are experienced regularly in practically all of India’s urban areas, be they metropolises or so-called tier-II, tier-III and below towns. As more and people migrate to cities in search of jobs, and more and more companies get into promising cities to set up business and provide employment, the problem magnifies.

Bengaluru, India’s much-touted technology capital, our very own Silicon Valley, is no exception. The city’s problems with infrastructure—both physical and social—are well documented and noted in formal as well as social media.

So, when a discussion happens on these challenges in India’s fast-growing IT hotspot, you expect sparks to fly. That is just what happened when a group of top CEOs of Bengaluru came together to deliberate on the challenges Bengaluru faces, and how that is impacting ‘Brand Bangalore’.

Views were aplenty, and with varying perspectives. While some said the city’s growth is good and problems are to be expected, others expressed indignation at the growing infrastructure knots and even rising misbehaviour of citizens. Still others offered suggestions on how things could be improved.

Amrit Acharya, CEO and co-founder of Zetwerk, for one, said he couldn’t imagine living in any other city in India, but Bengaluru still manages to frustrate. One suggestion he had was to improve ‘walkability’ in the city. “If you look at the best cities globally, they are extremely good for walking; in Bengaluru, you can restrict that to just the CBD (central business district)," he said, adding that while there are a lot of issues with infrastructure, focusing on sidewalks would the brand value of the city and could also have several unintended positive side effects.

Piyush Shah, co-founder, inMobi Group, and president & COO, Glance, and Dilipkumar Khandelwal, MD and CEO, Deutsche India, and global CIO-corporate function, Deutsche Bank AG, were more positive. Shah pointed to how the tech spectrum was widening through a new array of startups. “Who is starting has changed, what they are doing has changed, why they are doing also has completely changed," Shah said, adding that he has seen this happen in the Bay area, Beijing and, now, in Bengaluru. “We'll crib about the physical infrastructure, but the mindset infrastructure, the belief, is highly concentrated in Bengaluru."

As for Khandelwal, he said India has all kinds of problems, but problems also translate to opportunities. “You click that opportunity and start creating ideas, and a new startup can be built," he said, adding that all the problems that we see are very small in the overall context of India.

Satish V. N. Gidugu, whole-time director and CEO of Medi Assist Group, was more circumspect, noting that for Bengaluru to retain its edge, four things will need to be worked on. One, focus on jobs, and fix the gap between education and readiness for the workforce. Two, investors need to be patient with capital because businesses such as manufacturing, healthtech or medical devices are not short turnaround companies. They need to be persevered with to meet success and give more jobs.

Third, find ways to keep the workforce motivated. “I've got a bunch of people who say I can’t come to Bengaluru because I fall sick," he said. “As much as we love the city, it doesn’t work for everybody—the housing, sanitation, transport, how much time do I spend commuting."

And fourth, what we are giving back to society? “There's nothing stopping us posting our security guards outside our office gates to control traffic," he pointed out. “There’s a lot more that you can give back to society—whether it is incubating others, or teaching, training, reskilling others, etc."

Rishi Das, chairman and CEO of IndiQube, noted a positive for the city when he said his company has 60 properties in Bengaluru but he has not met a single politician to run them. “I can’t think of any other city where that can happen," he said. Pointing out that Bengaluru absorbs the most real estate compared to any city in the world, and double that of any city in India, Das said there is a big opportunity in renovation of the city centres. He also highlighted the trend of tier-II like Coimbatore or Indore are fuelling distributed offices.

Abhishek Kapoor, Group CEO of Puravankara Ltd, said that initially what attracted companies to Bengaluru were the quality of education and weather. But with growth has come a challenge in terms of having a liveability index for the city. “If we do not create future liveability in terms of our infrastructure planning and thinking, we will end up imploding," he said. “While I am extremely optimistic, if you don’t take cognisance of the risks, then you’re turning a blind eye. You can’t sit with your head in the sand."

Suresh Kumar K.K., head, data exchange and data spaces at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), was the most critical of where the city is headed. “I think we broke the fundamentals; we focused on going to the moon and finding out whether the south side has water or not," he said. “That’s not our priority. Our priority is how to reduce Bengaluru traffic."

He went on to add that the unfortunate part is that it is very easy to reduce traffic with available technology. But there is one problem. “Every startup works on one small technology, which will work in one junction, but there are 300 junctions in one stretch in the city," he pointed out. “And there is no company that is capable of doing that."

Sunil Chemmakontil, CEO of Adecco Group, was quite the contrarian in the group. While acknowledging that Bengaluru has an infrastructure problem, he expressed pride in the fact that more people are coming into the city, which is a reflection of more jobs being created. “As a country we have far less cities than China, the US, etc., that’s the biggest challenge we have," he said.

Shweta Bhatia, partner at Eight Roads Ventures, also took pride in the growth of Bengaluru, especially due to its sheer size and quality of engineering talent. The challenge, she said, is that we have a lot to invest in our cities and get the infrastructure and other things working.

Vivek Chandy, joint managing partner of JSA Advocates & Solicitors, lamented the increasing social indiscipline in the city, with vehicles moving down the wrong lanes, and people generally being impolite. At the same time, the lawyer in him said that the laws that are in place are sufficient to make Bengaluru a liveable place. And if those laws are enforced properly, things will be much better than they are today. He also cited an example of a visiting American CEO who was shocked by the state of traffic and rule-breaking on the roads, saying it reminded him of the “Wild West".

Noting that ‘Brand Bangalore’ was ultimately the perception of people and not the IT companies or unicorns or the people who work here, Chandy said, “I’m very concerned that unless there's serious enforcement of the laws, this brand is going to be diluted."

Shanti Mohan, founder & CEO of LetsVenture, suggested a public-private partnership (PPP) between the state and businesses, pointing to her experience of steel city Jamshedpur where this model has worked well. “I've seen how the private-public partnership really nurtures a city because a lot of it is a joint initiative between the citizens of the city and the government," she said, adding that we should pick one theme at a time and solve it over the next six months, and then pick the next challenge to work on.

The Bengaluru discussion was the third in a series of leadership roundtables that are being done with respect to improving per capita income of Indians, even as the country moves towards its stated goal of becoming a developed nation by 2047. How that can be done from different aspects, with involvement of all and sundry, is the focus of the series.