BOOK
REVIEW The
rise of India's 'IT paradise' Network City. Planning the
Information Society in Bangalore
by James Heitzman
Reviewed by Chanakya Sen
Information society emerged as an El Dorado in
economics around the middle of the twentieth
century, with historical progression showing
that workers drifted from extractive
agriculture to manufacturing and then
services, followed by a further shift to
knowledge-based activities. The Japanese
government of the 1960s pioneered plans for
powering into a post-industrial, "post-Fordist"
stage of production by investing in processors
and telecommunications. Singapore followed
suit by envisaging the city as a vast
information gateway, or switching hub, laden
with broadband Internet and multimedia. The
United States and Western Europe took the cue
and developed an elaborate "infostructure"
for keeping their dates with the digital age.
Lately, models of telematics-spurred
information societies have been forwarded as a
global phenomena that could spread to the
entire world and usher in sustainable
development. In this techno-social history,
titled Network City. Planning the
Information Society in Bangalore, James
Heitzman takes up the southern Indian city of
Bangalore, located in the state of Karnataka,
as a case study of an information society in
developing countries. The author reconstructs
the complex interactions among labor,
management, transnational corporations,
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the
state that made Bangalore a network city. As a
"node within the space of
production" (p 16), Bangalore felt that
human impact - like other urban sites -
transformed into "technopoles" in
the era of globalization. Heitzman's interest
is not merely in the planning of Bangalore as
a knowledge-centric core, but in the impact
technical change has had on the city's
residents.
Historically, Bangalore lacked major rivers
running around it or in the nearby environs.
Artificial lakes or tanks were dug by the
city's kings to provide a water supply and
support businesses, orchards, military and
administrative personnel. The defeat of the
Vijayanagara Empire in 1565 swung trade routes
and commercial activity in Bangalore's
direction and converted it into the leading
economic locale in the Deccan plateau. Under
Tipu Sultan in the eighteenth century, the
city experienced spurts in textiles,
metallurgy, ordnance and postal
communications. British advent caused
industrial decline but made Bangalore a node
within the colonial information network,
installing the first telegraph line in 1854.
The city achieved a reputation as a model
princely state in the late colonial period. In
1898-9, it had the first telephone lines in
the country to coordinate anti-plague
measures. In 1900, it became India's first
electrified city supplying power to run the
Kolar gold fields and steam textiles. M
Visvesvarayya, the dynamic Diwan (chief
minister) of the Mysore kingdom from 1912 to
1918, flagged off major strides for Bangalore
in iron and steel, irrigation, education and
engineering. He imagined Bangalore as a
"science city" with
"contributory facilities based on
information systems" as aids to trade (p
37).
At the time of India's independence, the city
had an emerging entrepreneurial and
technological base. Being host to public
sector giants like Hindustan Aeronautics,
Bharat Electronics and Hindustan Machine
Tools, Bangalore enjoyed a mushrooming of a
range of technical and service ancillaries in
its conurbation. City planners aped British
city models and relocated factories from
residential areas to distant outskirts.
Private businesses also expanded steadily,
thanks to the availability of power,
transportation and water.
Prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru took a
personal interest in Bangalore's profile as a
scientific-industrial temple. He saw it as the
"city of the future" and the
"template of a modern India". (p 61)
By 1971, the Bangalore metropolitan region
supported a buoyant regional economy
attracting medium and small-scale industries.
Corporate head offices fled the left-wing
militancy of Calcutta (now referred to as
Kolkata) and settled in Bangalore, rewarding
its liberal industrial policy.
As of 1991, the Bangalore region stood out
vis-a-vis other Indian cities for being an
innovative haven, but "from a global
perspective, it was not an especially wealthy
or healthy place". (p 69) Dramatic
unregulated growth of the urban sprawl
exceeded civic managerial capacity. All the
major lakes disappeared. Demand outstripped
supply in housing and other major utilities.
Eighty percent of newly built flats were being
gobbled by land speculators for luxury
apartments, pushing up real estate prices and
slum populations. Environmentalists jabbed at
Bangalore as a "formerly model
city".
The cash-strapped state government responded
to this urban infrastructure stasis with the
solution of partial privatization. Geographic
information systems were increasingly used to
superimpose spatial adjustments over existing
maps in planning documents. Computerized
mapping and specialized consulting firms were
hired by the authorities to solve congestion
and construction overkill. Equipped with
evolving technologies, planners drew new towns
that could draw away population from Bangalore
as "counter magnets". Benchmarking
programs against the standards of Singapore,
technocratic authorities pledged to deploy the
appropriate technology to enhance efficiency.
Heitzman notes a major change in planning
methodology wherein "centralized modes of
organization evolved into multi-entity
networks constructed around electronic
information systems". (p 104) The nature
of the state was less
"developmental" and more in line
with "coordinating" conditions for
economic growth led by the private sector.
NGOs and citizen-based organizations were the
other non-state actors that played
instrumental roles in the inter-organizational
networks that signified change in Bangalore.
These "third force" groups strove
for decentralizing urban self-governance and
involving the end-users of service delivery in
decision making about city amenities. Banking
on the hypothesis that information flows
advance efficiency, they galvanized denizens
for participatory planning.
Bangalore acquired an international reputation
as India's "Silicon Valley/Plateau"
suddenly in the 1990s. But it was the
denouement of "the gradual accumulation
of skills and capital since the beginning of
the twentieth century". (p 286) The
division of labor statistics in 1991 hardly
fit the image of a city with a milieu of
innovation, with barely any Silicon Valley
characteristics. However, a series of
state-engineered developments did engender a
niche within Bangalore's industrial economy
that pushed technology frontiers. Private
enterprises like Wipro Infotech responded to
prime minister Rajiv Gandhi's electronics
sector liberalization in 1984 and became one
of the city's first global successes. Infosys
Consultants (later Technologies) bagged
software outsourcing and body-shopping
agreements after Rajiv Gandhi's aides
facilitated a contract with General Electric
in 1988.
The success of these flag bearers and USAID
publications increased the interest of US
technology companies in Bangalore. Motorola,
Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett Packard
established subsidiaries in the city,
benefiting from its economic liberalization
policies. American companies were the largest
group of foreign investors fascinated by
electronics and telematics in Bangalore.
Software dove-tailed with India's new
export-oriented growth strategy and made up
the most positive contribution by Bangalore to
the country's trade balance.
The Karnataka state government's interventions
were also crucial in Bangalore's leapfrogging
technology curve. Besides launching the
"Electronics City" complex and
building Software Technology Parks, it engaged
in importuning propaganda promoting Bangalore
as a "Silicon Plateau" with themes
like "the future is here". Such
marketing techniques intersected with a time
of hyperbole and great expectations for
Indians trail blazing the fields of computers
and telecommunications. US commentators added
fuel to fire by claiming that "Bangalore
has put together all the ingredients of a
broad frontal attack on American hegemony of
the information revolution". (p 197)
But Heitzman cautions against the hyperbolic
rhetoric surrounding Bangalore as an IT
paradise. Rising production costs and
infrastructure shortages emerged in the late
1990s and so did domestic competitor cities
like Pune and Hyderabad. Bangalore's economy
as a whole showed no overpowering evidence of
post-Fordism at the turn of the millennium.
The Silicon Plateau mantra was "a pious
chant…a statement of what could be, rather
than what already was" (p 210), an
illustration of the power of language amidst
the global communications revolution.
Besides information technology, several other
ingredients determine Bangalore as an
information society. Bangalore urban district
has an overall literacy rate of 86%. Bangalore
University boasts of 375 colleges that include
21 reputed engineering schools. The city is
home to 25,000 software and computer science
engineers within an all-India total of
220,000. In response to market demands for
business-savvy techies, the Indian Institute
of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIIT-B)
is churning out batches of engineers who have
undergone two terms of classes in industry and
corporate management. Bangalore's Indian
Institute of Science (IISc) ranks among the
top 20 universities of the world. Its faculty
members consult about 100 projects for
industry every year. The availability of
expert research consultants and digitized
databases (as the ones offered by Informatics
India Limited) are major causes for the
clustering of New Economy firms in the city.
Bangalore also has a massive and pervasive
print culture, with 67 book publishers, 110
newspapers and countless specialized magazines
disseminating information to numerous social
groups. A dense array of film theaters makes
the city an important source of visual
information. More than 80% of Bangaloreans own
transistor radio sets, components of an
impressive electronic information system.
Television broadcasting in India is
intertwined with the country's space program
headquartered in Bangalore. Cable and
satellite penetration in the city is 59%. It
has 1.6 million telephone lines, one for every
nine persons. Many cellular companies maintain
headquarters or technical offices in Bangalore.
The Internet user population in the city in
2001 stood at 80,000, emanating from 750
educational institutions. Multinationals are
benefiting from a vast increase in bandwidth
for business ends.
Heitzman concludes that Bangalore "went
online during a twenty-year period" (p
259) and "informatized" as a city.
It can today be considered a regional cluster
within a global neo-liberal paradigm. This is
both strength and weakness, for worldwide
booms and busts in IT and bio-informatics
would synchronize crests and troughs in
Bangalore's economy. On the social front, the
application of hi-tech solutions has abetted
transparency and popular participation but
also concentrated wealth and power in the
hands of elites. Digital democracy is a far
cry in the network city.
Network City. Planning the Information
Society in Bangalore by James Heitzman,
Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2004. ISBN:
0-19-566606-2. Price US$18.50, 356 pages.
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