Bangalore - End of a Dream Run?

Imagine an idylic city in India - where the climate is moderate, there is lush greenery all around, where it takes 30-minutes to drive from one end to the other, where the people are well mannered, intelligent, accommodating and cosmopolitan in their outlook.

Now start adding more people to the city, start building more houeses, start growing educational/ engineering institutes in and around the city to churn out thousands of engineers. But don't yet start on expanding the infrastructure - electricity, roads, sewage, drainage. Worse still start building and expanding the city haphazardly, without any evaluation of the impact on the roads, traffic, pollution. Assume that these problems will somehow solve themselves.

What will you have? Something like what Bangalore has become today. While it is still the capital city of Indian IT, a lack of planning and foresight by the city's administrators has brought the city to a situation where everyone is disappointed and frustrated.

The companies are disappointed that the Bangalore that they were promised (or marketed) is not the same as the Bangalore that exists on the ground today. The migrants into the Bangalore realize that this is very different from the promised land that they had the dreams of. And to top-it off, the local populace who been painfully seeing the deterioration of the city, have started blaming the outsiders for this situation.

All these put together can create a very potent mix - of choked infrastructure, stymied growth and increased regionalism (reduced cosmopolitan nature). This can turn tide away from Bangalore (like increased parochialism did Calcutta in after the 60s).

Is this a real possibility? I would think that the chances are remote, but it surely has the chance of happening.

As citizens and well wishers of Bangalore, let us ensure that we do not lose focus of the real problem - lack of investment in infrastructure and most importantly - a lack of foresight and planning.