New Delhi: Bangalore Days or Bangalore Blues – if this was a Venn diagram, there would be no overlapping circles because you either love the city or you hate it; there’s no in-between. The way things are at the moment, there are more people who want to move away from it than those willing to settle here. Blame it on civic issues that are lamentable, traffic that moves at a pace slower than a sloth’s reaction time, rains that are actual downpours, and cost of living which is outrageous. So, when Bengaluru is being touted as the ‘least liveable city’ in India, there are no stiff eyebrows. It’s almost as if people expected this moniker sooner rather than later.
So, what has made the city so “unliveable” and that too so fast? According to a global city ranking index released by the European Intelligence Unit (EUI), the Silicon Valley is ranked 173. This ranking is based on five basic parameters, including healthcare, stability, culture and environment, infrastructure, and education. Among them, the EUI gives the most weightage to culture and environment, and stability. Bangalore it seems had neither! Not that it fared any better when it comes to infrastructural boom or other metrics as well.
- Bengaluru scored only 54.4 out of 100 in the EUI’s index.
- Only 46.4 out of 100 in the infrastructure category ( lower than Pakistan’s Karachi).
- It was ranked as the third-least livable city worldwide tied with Lagos in Nigeria.
Bengaluru has been steadily slipping behind in multiple such surveys and global ranks including the Global Smart City Index 2020 that placed Hyderabad at the 85th position, New Delhi at 86, Mumbai was at 93rd place and Bengaluru slipped to a dismal 95th position. It was at the 79th spot in the same ranking index in 2019. The cities blamed it on air pollution and road congestion – two factors that truly make matters worse, especially in a cosmopolitan city like Bengaluru.
Apart from factors which continue to be irritants for most metropolitan cities across the globe, there are other serious issues that plague Bengaluru, namely unplanned development.
No clean air, water or environment
There’s no simple answer to what makes Bengaluru progressively unlivable, particularly worsening in the last five years. A research paper published in the ‘Current Science’ magazine authored by Indian Institute of Sciences’ TV Ramachandra and Bharath H Aithal, mentions unplanned development as the numero uno reason for the city’s downfall.
(The below reasons are mentioned as prime factors in the research paper; it has been reproduced here as an edited version. The paper can be assessed here)
The urban jungle
According to the paper, urbanisation (1005% concretisation) has had a deep influence on Bengaluru’s depleting natural resources. Decline of green spaces, for example, meant a sharp decrease of 88 percentage of vegetation, 79 per cent decline in wetlands, unmanageably higher air pollutants and a sharp decline in groundwater.
The trees to human ratio is also as skewed as it could get with only 1.5 million trees to support Bengaluru’s staggering population of 14 million. This figure is indicative that there is only one tree for every ten persons in the city.
The other telling impact of concretisation of Bengaluru is the drastic reduction in green house gases which make the city water-scarce and unlivable.
Disappearing water bodies
Erstwhile Bangalore was known for its lakes that dotted every corner of the city. But field studies during 2015–16 revealed that out the 105 lakes that were there in the city, almost 98 per cent have been encroached upon for constructing illegal buildings. Almost 90 per cent of the lakes are also sewage-fed which meant enriched nitrate levels in the surrounding groundwater resources, that in turn threatened the health of residents with kidney failure or cancer.
The problem of frequent flooding
Geologists have witnessed frequent flooding in the city even during normal rainfall. This phenomena has happened post 2000, and scientists call it a side effect of ecologically destructive actions such as encroachment of natural drains, conversion of wetlands and removal of vegetation cover.
Carbon footprint growing
In Greater Bengaluru, carbon emissions is pegged at 43.83 per cent. The prime driver of this is the large-scale usage of private vehicles, almost 70 per cent of the present population own private vehicles to get to work. Activists blame this on abject lack of appropriate public transport system thus contributing to large scale emissions. The repercussions of a growing carbon footprint is known to all.
Bad roads and traffic congestion make it worse
The other thing that is ailing Bengaluru is the pitiable condition of the roads and the traffic situation which is gaining a notorious repute for the city. The potholes of Bengaluru have had a separate Instagram page with updates pouring in every minute. There are short tales and long accounts of how people have spent two hours just to get from one place to another. Then there are popular hotspots like Tumakuru Road, the Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) Road, apart from stretches in the tech hubs of Mahadevapura and Sarjapur Road which are known for being nightmarish for people who take this route on a daily basis.
Is there a concept of a “office hour” where traffic can be expected to be heavy and ease out later? “That is 24 hours. Because this is an IT hub, we have various shift timings that people cater to which is not restricted to only 8-9 hours. No relief from timings make it impossible to manoeuvre traffic snarls at important junctions. This also has a ripple impact on other neighbouring areas,” said Manav Mittal, an employee with a known IT firm in Electronic City.
It was not the case always, so what changed?
The unfortunate part of the soiree is that Bengaluru never had this reputation. It was known to be the cleanest and safest city according to pan-India and global indices. Migration was a buzz word and the city was a popular choice for those who hoped for a better life. The boom happened after the 90s when IT companies announced that B’lore was their first and only choice. Almost 50 per cent of the population of Bangalore is supposed to be migrant population; but that graph is also on a declining curve.
While the factors for Bengaluru getting more unliveable by the day is known to all, there is nothing much that seems to have been done in the name of positive development or creating stricter laws to curb carbon emissions and greenhouse gases. Blame it on the complacency of the state government or the lackadaisical attitude of the authorities who govern, Bengaluru is no longer the haven, nor the heaven, that it once used to be.
If things go on like this, experts say the city could be the worst in India in the next couple of years. Not the kind of a reputation that Bangalore is used to…
