Bangalore Builds Up, Not Out: Who Urban Planning Actually Serves

Introduction

Bengaluru is the fastest-growing tech hub in the world, and it also ranks third globally for the worst traffic. So where does the Karnataka government actually direct its budget? Toward traffic relief, toward tech hubs, or toward its people?

Roads are repaved again and again, each time with lower quality than the last, and the bulk of that spending flows toward areas serving tech corridors, ensuring visiting delegates have a smooth ride to their offices while ordinary workers navigate crumbling streets elsewhere. The city is famous for two things in the same breath: its weather and its traffic. Rain here can feel like it drives you to the edge and calms you down in the same afternoon. But Bengaluru’s roads aren’t built to handle it. Heavy rain combined with heavy traffic reliably produces flooding, blocked drains, and a fresh crop of potholes. The rain doesn’t just inconvenience the city; it exposes how poorly the roads were built in the first place. And through all of it, the tech corridors stay comparatively smooth.

Heavy rain combined with heavy traffic reliably produces flooding, blocked drains, and a fresh crop of potholes. The rain doesn’t just inconvenience the city; it exposes how poorly the roads were built in the first place. Yet the response to these problems isn’t uniform: major projects serving economically important corridors — tunnel roads, signal-free stretches, metro extensions — tend to receive rapid political attention and dedicated funding streams, while basic drainage and pothole repair in other neighbourhoods can go unresolved for years.

Anchor Project: The ORR Upgrade, Silk Board to KR Puram

In the 2025–26 budget, BBMP earmarked Rs 400 crore for a 22.7 km stretch of the Outer Ring Road running from Central Silk Board to KR Puram via Baiyappanahalli Metro Station, in partnership with the Karnataka government and BMRCL. The funding followed public backlash over the poor condition of the ORR between KR Puram and Central Silk Board — a stretch that happens to house several Fortune 500 companies.

Work began within months. Bengaluru Smart Infrastructure Ltd (B.SMILE), a newly formed agency for large infrastructure projects, started groundwork to bring the corridor up to “international standards” and has been tasked with hiring a private firm to design the main carriageway and service roads.

This project sits inside a much larger set of tech-corridor-focused allocations in the same budget. BBMP’s total 2025-26 budget was about Rs 19,930 crore. Within that, Rs 42,000 crore was earmarked for tunnel roads across the city — including Rs 17,780 crore specifically for a tunnel along NH-7 from Hebbal via Hosur Road to Silk Board, connecting major commercial and tech districts (this and other tunnel projects are being financed through an SPV/PPP structure with government-backed loans rather than directly out of the annual budget). Business interests along the corridor have engaged directly with the process: the Outer Ring Road Companies Association (ORRCA) has pushed BMRCL to speed up metro construction to Whitefield and has sought a seat on the committee that evaluates major infrastructure projects.

Comparison: Flood-Prone, Working-Class Wards

HBR Layout, a densely populated residential area near the Manyata Tech Park corridor, floods every monsoon. Residents describe overflowing drains, waterlogged streets, and damaged homes across multiple blocks problems they attribute to substandard contractor work that doesn’t survive a single rainy season, despite BBMP funds being allocated for it. Who has been held accountable for this repeated failure? BBMP? The state government? Or is it simply left to the residents, who absorb the cost of repairing flooded cars and bikes and swallow their frustration because there’s no one clearly answerable?

This isn’t a new problem. Drain infrastructure failures in central Bengaluru have been documented for over two decades. As early as 2003, city authorities promised a scientific overhaul of the storm-water drain system. By 2018, the chief minister was again directing BBMP to draft a drain master plan and consider demolishing structures encroaching on storm-water drains, a commitment first made nineteen years earlier and still not fully carried out. No one has been held to account for that gap. Perhaps part of the failure is that no one has consistently asked.

Flood-relief funding, when it does arrive, has also skewed toward tech-adjacent constituencies. A state government grant to BBMP for flood-proofing allocated Rs 160 crore to Mahadevapura, the constituency hit hardest by flooding, compared with Rs 40 crore to KR Puram, Rs 65 crore to Bommanahalli, and just Rs 10 crore each to Yelahanka and Byatarayanapura. It’s worth asking whether that funding translated into visible change on the ground. The pattern is hard to miss: tech corridors stay relatively dry while relief funding for the areas outside them remains comparatively thin.

In an interview, a long-time resident of Cement Colony — a low-income settlement on J.C. Road, near BBMP’s own headquarters — described water entering homes during even moderate rainfall, having to wait until reaching work to access clean drinking water, and overflowing manholes mixing with rainwater, leaving a stench that lingers for days. [Name/title], an adjunct professor at the National Law School of India University, described this as a representation gap in a [interview/published report — specify]: residents of informal settlements lack the political standing and space to participate in the planning decisions that shape their own neighbourhoods. The settlement sits within view of BBMP’s headquarters, where the tunnel and corridor projects described above are planned and approved.

Development for Whom? Questioning Infrastructure and Public Funds

What is the point of living in a city that can’t provide its people with basic necessities, even as its population and its businesses keep growing? What exactly is being built here, if not a slow-motion infrastructure failure for everyone outside the tech corridors? Residents of Manyata, HBR Layout, and similar neighbourhoods have reason to demand accountability for the funds allocated to their drainage systems and roads and reason to ask whether that money is reaching its stated destination or disappearing elsewhere.

Some of the numbers involved are large. Rs 6,000 crore was earmarked for white-topping major roads to improve durability and reduce potholes. Rs 3,000 crore was set aside for roughly 300 km of link roads along storm-water drains, intended to improve connectivity and flood control. Together, that’s over Rs 9,000 crore allocated – not necessarily yet spent – and it’s fair to ask whether the infrastructure on the ground today reflects that scale of investment, given how many residents are still dealing with the same problems year after year.

Set against the pattern this piece has traced — a tunnel road fast-tracked for a corridor with an organised business lobby pushing for it, and a settlement like Cement Colony still waiting on basic drainage within sight of BBMP’s own headquarters — the Rs 9,000 crore figure raises a narrower question than how much else it could have built elsewhere. It’s a question about sequencing: which parts of Bengaluru get funded and finished first, and which are left to wait years for the same attention? A city’s infrastructure budget is not just a sum of money; it’s a record of what the city decided mattered enough to fix now and for whom. Bengaluru has already shown it can build fast when the people asking are organised and economically visible. What it hasn’t shown is whether it can move with the same urgency for the people who have no seat on that committee at all.

Sources

BBMP 2025–26 budget documents and coverage (The News Minute, Deccan Herald, Construction World); BBMP/B.SMILE project announcements (Deccan Herald); Deccan Herald and ETV Bharat ward-level reporting on flooding in HBR Layout and central Bengaluru; Sanganal, “Urban Flood Management – A Case Study of Bangalore” (HLRN).