None of this has really changed. Yet, there are many who have begun questioning Bangalore's future and its ability to remain an attractive investment destination. This army of sceptics include some of the biggest investors in the city - people like Bob Hoekstra, CEO of Philips Software, and N.S. Raghavan, former joint managing director of Infosys Technologies, senior members of industry bodies like Nasscom, and countless people who work in Bangalore. Even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently said: "If Bangalore fails, India fails." The thought had indeed crossed his mind. The common arguments put forth by naysayers have to do with the city's infrastructure, which has collapsed. Hotel rooms are hard to come by, it takes hours to travel a few kilometres, there are endless queues at airport baggage retrieval belts, and so on. Meanwhile, Bangalore's technology companies are struggling with attrition rates that are among the highest in the country. They are fighting a bruising battle to retain talent at extraordinarily high salaries. Partha Iyengar, vice-president of Gartner, a consultancy, sums up the city's predicament. "Till recently, if you suggested Bangalore as an outsourcing destination, you couldn't lose your job. But these days, you might just."
But poor infrastructure or high attrition rates are just a sideshow to the Bangalore story. What is far more germane to the city's future is the politics being played out in the state - between coalition partners Deve Gowda, former prime minister and leader of Janata Dal Secular, and Dharam Singh, the state's chief minister from the Congress Party. Trapped in the middle of this power play is Bangalore.
Despite being allies, the functioning of the Gowda-Singh combine seems far from smooth. Singh himself says so. "Deve Gowda has a tendency to make a big deal out of a small issue," says the chief minister. Gowda, for his part, argues that he needs to play the Opposition in Karnataka - never mind that his party accounts for 17 ministers in the state Cabinet. Gowda says he has no alternative. "The recognised Opposition is hand in glove with the ruling party for the last five years... the Opposition should be functioning like a watchdog," he says. A senior bureaucrat explains that this is a coalition of equals, whose ideologies aren't quite aligned, and who are battling for the same political space.
Significantly, Gowda also believes that Bangalore needs to take a back seat in the development of Karnataka. In his interview to Businessworld a fortnight ago, he said it's high time other places like Mangalore and Mysore were given equal importance and an opportunity to flourish. He seemed to blame Bangalore's ills on its fast growth, and hinted that if the growth rates tapered, many of the problems might disappear.
"Decongestion is one of the main issues. It (Bangalore) is one of the fastest growing cities in the country. What will be the position of traffic congestion, pollution, drinking water problem [a few years down the line]? Do you know that when I left the state there were 238 slums in Bangalore, and today there are 565? You must also look at the other side of things. We are not here to only develop Bangalore," he said. His views are reminiscent of West Bengal's Left Front government, which, in the early part of its rule, deemed that Kolkata was irrelevant. It took a while for the government to change its stance and even longer to undo the damage that was done.