Five new tech towns in Bangalore
By agencies   |   Wednesday, 05 July 2006, 19:30 IST
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BANGALORE: Authorities in Bangalore are wooing foreign capital to crank up its creaking infrastructure to help lure back Western businesses. With other cities being targeted for outsourcing, the government plans to build new elevated highways, widen existing roads, develop satellite towns and set up a $1.4billion mass transit system in the city, home to more than 1,500 technology companies. While the IT industry officials stated that the government needs to speed up the projects and plan many more initiatives to sustain growth in India's Silicon Valley, Karnataka chief minister HD Kumaraswamy said he will encourage foreign investment in all areas of infrastructure building in and around Bangalore and promised immediate approvals will be granted to all such investment proposals. He also added that 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 companies such as IBM, Intel and Microsoft but its rapid growth has led to traffic jams on potholed roads, overcrowded public transport and irregular power supply. Rajendra Misra, managing director of private equity firm Tenet Holdings Private, said, "Bangalore, which is essentially a brand that has been created painfully in the last so many years, is fast disappearing." 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 businesses, which have helped transform a tranquil city into a buzzing metropolis of 6.5 million people, that makes up a third of India's $23billion software and back-office service industry, say Bangalore needs large investments. 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. 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 companies including India's second-largest software services business, Infosys Technologies, and its smaller rival, Wipro. Tata Consultancy Services, India's top software services exporter, said earlier this month it plans to invest 5 billion rupees ($108million) in a new software development center in the western Indian city of Pune. Anant Koppar, president of MphasiS BFL's technologies division, said, "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."

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