Is Bengaluru slowly DYING?

The city is clearly headed on the trajectory of fate that has befallen the other major metropolises in India, going by the huge influx of migrant labour, professionals and fortune-seekers. It is missing those dreaded statistics that drown the hoi polloi in depths of despair only by a whisker. With civic amenities bursting at the seams, water bodies disappearing, vehicular population and pollution escalating to new heights and slums proliferating all around, how long can it retain that ‘most liveable tag’ among Indian cities? Bangalore’s natural advantages such as salubrious climate and cosmopolitanism are proving to be its nemesis.

This is how the columnist, M A Siraj dissects the projections by the International Urban Planning Workshop 2012 held under the aegis of Les Ateliers (The Paris Design Institute). Source - The Hindu

Major Factor pushing Bangalore into the league of dead cities - Inequalities in all aspects - development, access, growth, income, health....

Siraj writes,..

Bangalore is doomed to meet the fate other Indian cities suffered, if no urgent measures are initiated to arrest the downslide into inequalities that reduce a sizeable population to serfdom and servitude of the narrow class of elite.

Vast differences

The annual per capita income of the average Bangalorean is currently pegged at Rs. 74,709 (or US$ 1,659 in 2007). Wait! There are a few more statistics worth a cheer. The city is home to 65,000 super-rich people (annual income of Rs. 4.5 crore plus) and 10,000 dollar millionaires. It is considered the third largest hub for the net worth individuals in India. But that’s all we have to celebrate.

Nearly 25 per cent of its population lives in 800 to 1,000 slums that dot the railway sidings, embankments of rajakaluves and ensconced behind those large billboards that peddle stuff beyond the reach of those they obscure from the public eye. According to Benjamin Saloman, one of the compilers of the report, if the non-slum poor people are included, more than 40 per cent of the city’s population will be defined as ‘poor’.

Environment

The city has added 3.5 million residents within a 15 km radius of the Central Business District during the last 18 years. Private developers created 10.5 million sq. m of office space in the area, enticing 7.7 lakh qualified professionals. Significantly, between 1995 and 2007, unauthorised development gobbled up 33 sq. km area of the green belt.

Add the vehicular pollution to the human crush and the heat radiated from the vertically rising city, and imagine how skewed has been the planning for the city that touted itself as the greenest and cleanest State capital not long before.