In an earlier article, we explored how rural areas surrounding Bengaluru are affected due to the city’s expansion. Here, we look at how Bidadi’s transformation from a quiet agricultural area to an industrial hub affects the people who call it home.
Nestled along the historic Bengaluru-Mysuru corridor in present-day Ramanagara district lies Bidadi, a town whose very name carries echoes of its past. Derived from the Kannada word “Bidara,” meaning a resting place, oral histories recount how the Maharaja of Mysuru once paused here during long journeys between the two cities. In those early years, Bidadi was defined not by scale or infrastructure, but by pause, movement, and a quiet rhythm shaped by land and people.
This modest agrarian settlement was where travellers, merchants, and stories converged. The landscape was deeply productive and interconnected. Generations of farmers cultivated coconuts, mangoes, arecanut, and silk, alongside dairy systems that ensured daily income. Agriculture was a system of life, interweaving irrigation networks, soil fertility, livestock, and community to sustain both ecology and economy. As the highway grew busier, Bidadi became famous for thatte idli. Travellers stopped for steaming, plate-sized idlis, turning a local culinary practice into regional markers.
The shift powered by industries and leisure spaces
The arrival of Toyota Kirloskar Motor in 1997 turned Bidadi from a quiet agricultural landscape into a growing industrial hub, expanding infrastructure and attracting migrant labour. Around the same time, the Namdhari Group scaled global agribusiness, while Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages built a major bottling plant.
Industrialisation also catalysed a parallel transformation in leisure and consumption: Eagleton Golf Resort (1998) introduced premium recreation, Wonderla (2005) attracted urban thrill-seekers, and Innovative Film City (2008) added an entertainment economy, reimagining Bidadi as a space of consumption. This consolidated as KIADB layouts drew ancillary manufacturing units, Paramount Nutritions (2008) added food processing, and Bosch (2015–2019) embedded Bidadi into global industrial circuits.
Administratively, Bidadi’s 2015 transition to a Town Municipal Council transformed a rural cluster into a recognised urban entity spanning nearly 19 square kilometres. Its population skyrocketed from 6,267 in 2001 to over 20,000 by 2015, absorbing the pressures of an industrial shift that began in the late 1990s.
Fertile lands still thrive…
Notably, even as industry expanded, agriculture did not disappear. It continues to anchor local livelihoods in powerful ways. The region remains deeply productive, sending nearly six lakh litres of milk daily to Bengaluru via KMF networks. For rural households, especially the 25% of women involved, dairy provides predictable earnings every few weeks that sustain livelihoods and support on-going agricultural investments.
The agricultural system was not isolated but supported by a dense network of coconut plantations, mango orchards, chikoo farms, and sericulture. Villages like Chikka Byramangala contributed significantly to silk production, linked directly to Bengaluru’s textile economy. These are central regional economic activities. To describe Bidadi as “available land” overlooks this complexity; it is productive, interconnected, and essential.
The environmental implications are equally significant. The region supports diverse trees like coconut, arecanut, mango, and banana alongside staple crops such as ragi. These form ecological systems that sustain soil health, groundwater recharge, and biodiversity. The presence of livestock further strengthens this system, creating cycles of fodder, manure, and income that reinforce sustainability.
This is the Bidadi of today: a layered landscape of agriculture, industry, and emerging urbanisation, continuously in the making. Driven by a narrative reimagining it as a planned urban township rather than a productive landscape, the seeds of this vision were planted in 2006. The Bangalore Metropolitan Region Development Authority (BMRDA) identified Bidadi as a pilot site for integrated township development covering approximately 10,000 acres. Yet, the BMRDA Structure Plan 2031 states these efforts did not meet “envisaged success“. What followed over the next two decades was not a linear process, but a series of pauses, political shifts, and renewed ambitions.
Read more: Opinion: The reforms that protesting farmers really want and need
Farmers’ protests and the political push
Resistance has been a perennial marker to Bidadi’s growth trajectory; farmers challenged the classification of their lands as “dry land.” For them, land is not just property, it is livelihood, identity, and continuity. The 2008 financial crisis stalled the project temporarily, but the idea never disappeared. It was always awaiting the right (political) moment that arrived in the mid-2020s. With the formation of the Greater Bengaluru Development Authority and renewed political push, the project re-emerged as the Greater Bengaluru Integrated Township. In 2025, land acquisition notifications were issued, once again leading to protests. Under the “Nanna Bhoomi, Nanna Hakku” banner, more than 3,500 farmers submitted objections.
Even as protests continue, the project evolved from a township into an AI-driven megacity vision, with thousands of acres allocated for technology sectors. In 2026, acquisition moved forward, with final notifications issued for several villages and compensation packages announced. On paper, this process appears structured, compensation quantified, policies framed and development projected as inevitable.
The reality of losing land
But this official narrative misses a longer, rarely documented journey. There is a particular moment in the life of a farmer when land changes hands. It is often seen as closure, the end of ownership, the beginning of something new. But that moment is not the end. It is the beginning of a longer journey, one that is rarely documented. Land, for small and marginal farmers, is a dynamic source of income, security, and environmental relationship.
Compensation, however, is a finite lump sum without sustaining mechanisms. Over time, it disperses into immediate needs – housing, social obligations, daily expenses without generating long-term stability. This is the compensation paradox. What appears as economic gain transforms into vulnerability.
As agricultural systems collapse, farmers begin to drift. Some remain nearby, but their connection to the land morphs: fields become layouts, irrigation disappears, and local economies reorganise construction and services while soil and crops knowledge loses value. Others move toward urban centres such as Bengaluru, but entry is unequal. Without formal education or access to skilled employment, many enter precarious informal jobs.
Informal settlements and unequal growth
Similarly, unable to access formal markets, people settle along roads, behind industrial areas, and in peri-urban clusters. Often described as illegal or unplanned, this framing misses a crucial point: informality is not accidental, it is produced. It emerges when planning prioritises land over livelihoods, when economic transitions exclude the displaced, and when cities expand without integrating the people who sustain them. Thus, informality is not outside planning; it is an outcome of it.
Bidadi illustrates this clearly. Its earlier industrial phase allowed for some labour absorption with manufacturing that anchored local economies. In contrast, the current shift to the services sector may generate growth, but misses inclusion. As Bidadi evolves into a township, familiar contradictions: planned spaces and informal settlements; regulated economies with unregulated labour will likely emerge. The ecological and economic costs of this transformation are significant with consequences extending beyond Bidadi, affecting supply chains that feed and support urban populations.
This raises the question: Is large-scale urban expansion the only path forward?
Bidadi’s multiple strengths are active systems, not remnants of the past. To replace them with a singular urban model risks erasing diversity in favour of uniformity. An alternative lies in decentralisation not as a rejection of urbanization, but as a rethinking of it. Instead of expanding cities outward, planning can focus on strengthening existing systems, distributing growth, and integrating livelihoods into development. What is at stake is not land, but the continuity of life built upon it.
If cities continue to grow by absorbing and transforming without integrating, they will continue to produce the margins they seek to control. Informality will persist not as an external problem, but as an internal condition. The future of Bidadi is not just about what is built, but about who is included in that process. And in that question lies the possibility of choosing differently.
This article is second of a four-part series that closely examines the consequences of indiscriminate urban expansion and land acquisition, and the impact this has on communities, in the backdrop of farmers’ protest against the Greater Bengaluru Integrated Township (GBIT) project in Bidadi.