Category: Infrastructure

Businesses in Ramtekdi Industrial Estate are expected to manufacture, employ and attract customers, but the basic infrastructure around them tells another story.  The industrial estate in Hadapsar is home to small and medium manufacturing units, including businesses supplying Indian companies and exporting overseas. For our unit on Lane 1, getting to work means navigating a road broken into deep craters that fill with stagnant water during the monsoon season. Trucks carrying goods, workers on two-wheelers and visitors to the factory, all have to negotiate the same stretch. The state of the approach has become a problem for the business itself.…

The Urban Development Department published the draft Greater Bengaluru Authority (Parking) Rules, 2026 on August 11 and opened it up to the public to give suggestions and file objections. This draft is the legal framework meant to strengthen Bengaluru's Parking Policy 2.0, introduced by the Directorate of Urban Land Transport in Feb 2021. When the parking policy was first brought in, the idea was to discourage the use personal vehicles and free up road space to ensure better mobility. However, the draft rules mostly focus on creating paid on-street parking zones, off-street parking on corporation land, leasing vacant private plots to run…

Imagine the entire population of a small country getting packed beyond capacity in trains so that they can reach their workplace. This is what happens on Mumbai’s suburban railway trains daily. Every day 62 lakh people travel by the Central Railway in Mumbai—that’s almost the entire population of Singapore. Not to be sidetracked, the Western Railway (WR) ferries 31 lakh commuters daily—that's the number of people who live in the whole of Mongolia.It is no surprise that Mumbai’s suburban railway network draws unimaginable crowds. After all, it is one of the most affordable, fastest and well-connected means of transport available…

For Dhanasekaran, a resident of Ezhilmuga Nagar, an area adjacent to the proposed Global Sports City project site, the vast stretch of land in Semmencheri is more than an empty plot waiting to be developed. Every monsoon, he watches it transform into a sheet of water, carrying runoff from surrounding neighbourhoods towards the Pallikaranai Marshland. "We are the poorvakudi (original inhabitants) of this place. Even though we were relocated here years ago, this has become our home," says Dhanasekaran, standing beside the 112-acre site where the project is set to come up. "Officials may not know how much water will…

As visitors arrive at Kempegowda International Airport, they are welcomed by lush indoor greenery designed to showcase Bengaluru's identity as the "Garden City." Beyond the airport gates, however, the reality is starkly different. Roads and streets all over the city are losing the green cover that once defined its character, to make way for metro lines, elevated corridors, and road-widening projects. Development is essential for a growing metropolis. But when it comes at the cost of thousands of trees, it raises a difficult question: can Bengaluru continue to build for the future without erasing the very landscape that made it…

Inside her 10x10 sq ft home in Pulianthope, Parvathy faces unbearably hot conditions during the sweltering summers from March to July. Green shade is a rare luxury in her neighbourhood, home to many marginalised families who earn a living making shoes. “We live right under the roof on the second floor, so it’s hot. Even if we open all the windows and doors, it does not help. Here, we end up spending more time on the streets to find respite,” she says. As temperatures continue to climb, residents like Parvathy are left with little relief. Despite July’s arrival with hopes…

Selomi's text arrived at 7 am. "Let's leave by 8.30. The traffic will be brutal otherwise." We both live about 10 kilometres from the government office we had been going to every day for the last two weeks. The nearest metro station is four kilometres from our homes, which means forty minutes to reach it, twenty on the metro, and twenty-five on foot from Vidhana Soudha to the office. An hour and twenty minutes each way, assuming nothing goes wrong. In Bengaluru, something always does. By the end of the second week, we had the routine down. Coffee in a…

Nearly a decade ago, while I was working on the Revised Master Plan for Bengaluru (RMP 2031), a senior planner remarked: “Only the Bengaluru Development Authority (BDA) has the legal right to plan for Bengaluru.” Today, that assertion is unravelling in a tussle between the newly formed Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) and the BDA over who should plan for the city’s future. What is more troubling is that Bengaluru’s current master plan, the RMP 2015, is based on surveys from 2003, nearly two decades out of date. The Karnataka Town and Country Planning Act (KTCPA) of 1961 requires revision every…

In a country like ours, where mass gatherings of various kinds are an integral part of life, we keep hearing of stampedes invariably leading to casualties, every now and then. Last year saw two such events, which made national headlines and shook the nation, one a sports victory parade gone sour in Bengaluru and the other, a stampede at a political road show in Karur, Tamil Nadu. The year before, Chennai witnessed huge crowds at an IAF show on the Marina Beach, which led to five deaths and more than a hundred hospitalisations due to heat-related issues and chaos arising…

Commuters passing through Ambattur Industrial Estate inevitably find a layer of dust coating their vehicles, faces, and hands. For Lalitha*, a domestic worker employed at a high-rise apartment near Padi flyover’s Saravana Stores, the last two weeks of December have been especially unbearable. "Dust, dust, dust everywhere," she says, coughing through a persistent cold. At 6 pm, when the rush hour begins, it takes her nearly 30 minutes by bus to cover the 5 km journey home. The ride to the Dunlop area is punctuated by pollution, blaring horns, and endless traffic snarls. “It should take 15 minutes usually, but…