Bangalore Traffic - 900 new cars every day!

Thecity at the heart of India’s booming information-technology industry is alreadychoking on its own success; but the boom has barely begunTHE arrivingbusinessman, anxious to get to grips with India’s information-technology industryin its very capital, may need a little patience. He might meet his first traffic jamjust outside Bangalore’s airport. He can examine the skeleton of the early stagesof a planned flyover on the airport road. Construction started in February 2003 andwas due to be completed in April 2004. Three-quarters of the work is still to bedone, but the building site is idle. A dispute over cost escalation led to acancellation of the contract (the rusting steel that forms the skeleton was gettingmore expensive by the day).To say the least, this is bad public relations forBangalore, the hub of the great Indian boom in software and remote services, such ascall-centres (known as “business process outsourcing‿, or BPO). It seems toconfirm recent scare stories that the city has ground to a halt, and its governmentdoes not care. Late last year, some of the leading lights of Indian informationtechnology (IT), such as Wipro’s founder, Azim Premji, and his counterpart atInfosys, Narayana Murthy, gave warning that Bangalore was in trouble. The INDIANEXPRESS, a national newspaper, took up the cause with a front-page series on“Bangalore crumbling‿.Elections last May in the state of Karnataka, ofwhich Bangalore is the capital, were taken as a rebuff for the urban elite from thepoor rural majority. After a series of failed monsoons, farmers were suffering.Driven into the grip of usurious money-lenders, more than 700 had killed themselvesin the year before the elections. So the new administration, under its chiefminister, Dharam Singh, a portly grass-roots politician who prides himself on hiscommon touch, forswore the “urban bias‿ of its predecessor.The city soon feltthe pain of the government’s inattention. “As companies we have scaled up,‿says Bob Hoekstra, boss of a big Bangalore software centre for Philips, a Dutchconsumer-electronics giant. “But the government has scaled down.‿ Bangalore’sinfrastructure was already creaking after years of breakneck expansion. Yet foreignfirms were continuing to pour in at the rate of three a week. Newly prosperousresidents have kept buying motorcycles and cars, adding, say officials, 900 vehiclesa day to the already overloaded streets…