Garbage dumps and traffic jams in the Silicon Valley of India (Travel with MP Prabhakaran)

(This is Chapter 14 from Mr. Prabhakaran’s book, An Indian Goes Around the World – I: Capitalism Comes to Mao’s Mausoleum, which we have been serializing in this space. Chapter 15, “What Makes Islamic Turkey Different from Islamist Saudi Arabia,” will be published next week. Read the series every Monday. – Editor)

Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka State in India, has made remarkable progress in the area of information technology (IT). There aren’t many cities in the world that attract as many outsourced high-tech jobs from the United States and Europe as Bangalore does. The city has deservedly been called the Silicon Valley of India, after the place in the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. which pioneered the personal computer and IT revolution. Silicon Valley, it may be added, became the center of the dot-com bubble of the mid-1990s.

Though the bubble has since burst, the valley still retains its status as one of the leading Internet- and computer-related research and development centers in the world. The burst, however, did not affect Bangalore’s rapid advancement on the information superhighway – to borrow an expression coined by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.

The sudden fame has transformed Bangalore from what was once a laid-back city, where Indian civil servants and military personnel belonging to the upper echelon preferred to spend their retirement years, into one of the preferred destinations of travelers from around the world. There is hardly a coffee shop or antique store on Mahatma Gandhi Road and Brigade Road, two favorite tourist haunts, where one doesn’t come across foreigners sipping coffee, gossiping or window-shopping.

Many of them are backpackers in their twenties. And all of them seem to be happy. No complaints about the price of the coffee or of any merchandise they buy. For those traveling with euros and U.S. dollars, the prices of goods and services in India should give no cause for complaints. But there are constant complaints among them, though, about the city’s crumbling infrastructure, public transportation system and deplorable sanitary condition.

19^th-Century Infrastructure

A lot has been written about the problems related to Bangalore’s infrastructure. It is to the credit of the city government and the government of Karnataka State that improving it has been given top priority by both. Their determination to build a modern metro system* is a major step in that direction. No visitor can fail to notice the construction activities going on all over the city. But the problem is that modernizing the infrastructure built for a 19^th-century small town is much more difficult than building a new one suitable for a bustling city of the 21^st century. Every nook and cranny of the city is densely populated and no construction activity can be undertaken without causing considerable inconvenience to the residents of those places. To make matters worse, there are politicians always at the ready to exploit people’s difficulties and turn them into votes, in the following election, against the parties in power. So if the work on infrastructure, even the much-trumpeted Namma Metro (our metro) is slow, the parties in power are only partly to blame.

The same is the case with the ever-deteriorating sanitary and traffic conditions. The sanitary condition is made worse by people who routinely dump garbage on streets and sidewalks. It hurts the sensibilities of those who love the city to see piles and piles of garbage lying around and stray dogs and stray cows helping themselves to whatever they find edible. Not just stray animals, even human beings often rummage garbage piles – that too with their bare hands. They are looking for salvageable objects, so they can make a living selling them. Sights like these ill-behoove a city that takes pride in being the IT capital of India.

To the extent that it still relies on primitive ways of clearing the garbage and disposing of it, the city administration is to blame. By ‘primitive ways’ I mean that sanitary workers still use hand-held brooms and clear the garbage with bare hands. People who dump the garbage on streets are equally to blame for this abominable situation.

Another problem that often makes life miserable, not just for tourists but ordinary citizens also, is the city’s perennial traffic jams. They have become very much part of the city life that people have stopped complaining about them. Many Bangaloreans, politicians counted first, campaigned for years to change the city’s name to Bengaluru, because that happened to be the name of the place in folklores, fables and stone inscriptions. One wishes that they had spent half as much time campaigning to clean up the filth in the city and improve its steadily-deteriorating traffic condition.

City’s Name Should Be ‘Jamgalore’

An opinion piece that appeared in the May 2, 2009, edition of The Times of India, India’s leading English daily, says that the city’s name should have been changed not to Bengaluru but Jamgalore. One couldn’t agree with the author of the piece more. “In Bangalore,” says Jug Suraiya, the author, “people talk of traffic jams. They talk of the traffic jams they got into yesterday, and the ones they will probably get into tomorrow,” while “still stuck in day before yesterday’s jam.”

There are only a few roads in the city which have traffic lights and sidewalks. Motorists often ignore ‘stop’ signs, especially when there are no traffic police around. Their disregard for traffic rules cause not just traffic jams but accidents too. The IT capital of India has also become the accident capital of India. The victims of such accidents are not only motorists but also innocent pedestrians. The latter’s right to cross the road when the green light is on is often violated by motorists, who are always in a hurry.

Pedestrians are not safe on sidewalks either. Motorcyclists, impatient to get ahead of vehicles in front of them, often invade sidewalks, leaving no space for pedestrians to use. There are also private cars and pick-up trucks permanently parked on sidewalks, in total disregard for municipal laws and civilized norms.

There is another problem – which the city can easily solve. The problem may not be as life-threatening as the ones discussed above. It affects mainly foreign tourists who rely on the city’s public-transportation system. It is not the system’s rickety buses that I am talking about. While all well-wishers of the city hope that the authorities recognize the danger such buses pose to public safety and take immediate remedial actions, they are aware that those buses cannot be ordered off the road overnight.

I am referring to the helplessness foreign tourists experience in figuring out where a particular bus is going. As I mentioned earlier, most tourists in the city are backpackers. Backpackers, by definition, are low-budget travelers. They depend on the public-transportation to get around the city. The signboards on buses that indicate their destinations are of little help to them. Except for a few long-distance buses, the destinations are written in Kannada, the official language of Karnataka State. Those who don’t know Kannada have to seek the help of half a dozen people to make sure that they are boarding the right bus. They would find it immensely helpful if the city can order right away that a line be added, in English, to what now exists only in Kannada, indicating the destination of the bus.

This suggestion doesn’t come out of any disrespect for Kannada. There is no denying that the primary purpose of public transportation is to serve the public and that all pertinent information should be provided in a language that most people understand. The suggestion is made with a view to seeing Bangalore, which has already earned a place on the tourist map of the world, live up to its reputation.

English, to state the obvious, is the lingua franca of the world. Most cities around the world, interested in attracting foreign tourists, have already adopted the practice of providing travel-related information in English, in addition to the local language. Mumbai may be an exception, in spite of its being the commercial capital of India. There, even the numeral indicating the bus route is written in Marathi, which in turn is derived from Devanagari. (Unless, of course, the traveler has enough time to run to the side of the bus before boarding it. On the side, help is available: the route number is written in Arabic, as is the practice all over the world, and the destination in English.)

Beijing and Shanghai Are Far Ahead

          Take the case of China, where English is not as widely used as in India. In Beijing and Shanghai, the two largest cities of China, one can go places without knowing even a word of Mandarin. Buses and trains make announcements (pre-recorded) of approaching stops and stations in Mandarin as well as English. The public is very helpful, too. The educated among the Chinese rarely miss an opportunity to brush up their English when an English-speaking foreigner approaches them with a question. No wonder foreign travelers and business investors are flocking to China in droves, making it the fastest-growing economy in the world.

          On the information superhighway, Bangalore may be far ahead of Beijing and Shanghai. But in making it tourist-friendly, it has a long way to go before catching up with the two Chinese cities. And this, in spite of the fact that Indians are more facile with English, the language predominantly used on the information superhighway, than the Chinese. Bangalore has yet to live up to its reputation as the Silicon Valley of India.

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*UPDATE: The first phase of the Bangalore metro was inaugurated on October 20, 2011.

Photos: 1)
The two illuminated buildings in the picture, at the busy intersection of St. John’s Church Road and Haines Road, in the Coles Park area of Bangalore, rent out space for special events, mostly weddings. This is a typical scene at night when such an event takes place in the building to the left. Guests at the event convert the public road into a private parking lot, leaving hardly any room for city buses and private motorists to pass through. When a frustrated neighborhood resident complained about this egregious violation to the traffic police on beat at the intersection, he was given a phone number to call and report the matter and dismissed as a nuisance

2)

This is what the same St. John’s Church Road-Haines Road intersection looks like on a typical working day. As one can see, the road and sidewalk are at the same level, making it easy for motorists to encroach on the sidewalk, leaving no room for pedestrians. A row of cars is seen permanently parked on the sidewalk. The cars belong to some of the neighborhood residents and the owner of the building to the left which rents out space for weddings and other celebrations. Other neighborhood residents are appalled that this blatant violation takes place under the very noses of the traffic police who are on duty at the intersection most of the time. The picture above and this caption are true of any busy intersection in Bangalore.

(M.P. Prabhakaran can be reached by email at [email protected])

12
A morning walk by the Mekong; A restaurant named after my niece

Chapter: 11:
A jacket and a bride for the price of one: Shopping on Nanjing Road (Travel with MP Prabhakaran)

10:
How a Shanghai neighborhood got an Indian name

9: 
Capitalist celebrations in Communist China – on May Day (Travel with MP Prabhakaran

8) Capitalism Comes to Mao’s Mausoleum – But in Its Crude Form

7) Picture of a cow on Beijing billboard confuses a Hindu (Travel with MP Prabhakaran)

6) Yoga on Copacabana, conducted by a Brazilian beauty (Travel with MP Prabhakaran)

5
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4) 
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3) Brahma and Laxmi reincarnate in Brazil? (Travel with M.P. Prabhakaran)

2) Eva Peron’s tomb is too small for her ego (Travel with M.P. Prabhakaran)

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http://dlatimes.com/article.php?id=40709

(about the author) An Indian Goes Around the World – I (Capitalism Comes to Mao’s Mausoleum)http://dlatimes.com/article.php?id=40126