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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