BENGALURU: Silicon Valley of India, Bengaluru, long celebrated as the engine of the country’s digital boom, is now struggling under the weight of its own success.
Endless traffic jams, monsoon flooding, water shortages and crumbling roads are eroding productivity and testing patience in a city that hosts some of the world’s biggest tech companies.
Entrepreneur RK Misra, co-founder of a multimillion-dollar start-up, summed up the daily grind bluntly. The "situation is pretty bad. And it hurts by not being able to plan your day", he told AFP, describing his draining 16-kilometre commute that can stretch to two hours. The congestion is so punishing that he rarely schedules in-person meetings before noon.
“It also discourages people from doing anything other than work, because there’s no work-life balance any more,” he said.
The distress is widespread along the city's flagship Outer Ring Road (ORR) corridor — a 20km stretch lined with Fortune 500 offices and more than a million employees.
Despite its global reputation, the belt is riddled with potholes, floods each monsoon, and struggles with chronic water scarcity in summer.
The situation has prompted some companies to reconsider their presence. In September, BlackBuck CEO Rajesh Yabaji announced he was shifting his firm out of the ORR belt after the "average commute for my colleagues shot up to 1.5+ hours (one way)", adding the roads were "full of potholes and dust, coupled with lowest intent to get them rectified".
Pharma pioneer Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw also expressed alarm. “Why are the roads so bad and why is there so much garbage around? Doesn’t the government want to support investment?” she wrote on social media.
Bengaluru recorded the world's third-slowest traffic in 2024, according to the TomTom Traffic Index — worse than London or San Francisco.
City planners and industry groups warn that the infrastructure strain is undermining Bengaluru’s standing in the global tech ecosystem. “Companies would like to get the basics right — and today those basics are getting compromised,” said Manas Das of the Outer Ring Road Companies Association.
BS Prahallad, technical director of the government-backed Bengaluru Smart Infrastructure Limited, admitted to AFP that an average resident takes 90–100 minutes to travel 16km. “Something has to be done, now or never,” he said. “The next step is, we will decay.”
In response, deputy chief minister DK Shivakumar said more than "10000+ potholes" had been identified, with half repaired so far. He urged citizens to “build Bengaluru up — together”, adding that the world views India through the lens of its tech capital.
The state government has announced a London-style governance overhaul, splitting the municipal corporation into five bodies under a new Greater Bengaluru Authority to streamline planning and services.
Once famed as a “garden city” and a “pensioner’s paradise”, Bengaluru rapidly transformed after India’s 1990s software boom. Outsourcing firms and Silicon Valley investments turned it into a global IT hub, quadrupling Karnataka’s software exports to $46 billion between 2014 and 2024. But environmental experts say this explosive growth came at a steep cost.
Ecologist Harini Nagendra said rapid expansion clogged waterways, felled trees and erased wetlands. “We have flooding because water has no place to go, drought because the water is not infiltrating into the ground,” she said. “People are choking on pollution, choking on the concrete.”
Nearly half the city now relies on borewells that run dry in summer, while the rest depend on costly water tankers — a crisis expected to intensify with climate change, according to WELL Labs.
Veteran investor TV Mohandas Pai remains cautiously hopeful. Bengaluru’s infrastructure may be “possibly three to five years behind”, he said, but the long-term outlook is still positive.
“The future is going to be bright, but there is going to be pain,” he told AFP. “We are suffering the pangs of growth because India knows how to handle poverty, not prosperity.”
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