A Plea to Make India's IT Capital Tourist-Friendly
By M.P. Prabhakaran
Bangalore, India: The progress Bangalore has made in the area of information technology (IT) is commendable. Not many cities in the world attract as many outsourced high-tech jobs from the United States and Europe as Bangalore. The city has deservedly been called the Silicon Valley of India, after the place in the San Francisco Bay Area of America which pioneered the personal computer and information technology revolution. Silicon Valley, it may be added, became the center of the dot-com bubble of the mid-1990s.
Though the bubble has since burst, the Valley still retains its status as one of the top Internet- and computer-related research and development centers in the world. The burst had no effect, though, on Bangalore’s rapid progress on the Information Technology Superhighway, to borrow an expression coined by former vice president Al Gore of the United States.
The sudden fame has transformed Bangalore from what was once a laid-back city where Indian civil servants and military personnel from the upper echelon preferred to spend their retirement years into a preferred destination of international tourists. There is hardly a coffee shop or antique store on Mahatma Gandhi Road and Brigade Road, two favorite tourist haunts, where one doesn’t come across foreigners sipping coffee, gossiping or window-shopping. Many of them are backpackers in their twenties. And all of them seem to be happy. Hardly any complaint is voiced by them about the price of the coffee or merchandise. For those traveling with euros and U.S. dollars, the price of goods and services in India should give no reason for any complaint. But there are complaints galore among them about two things: the infrastructure and the public transportation system of Bangalore.
19th Century Infrastructure
A lot has been written about the deplorable condition of Bangalore's infrastructure. It is to the credit of the city government and the government of Karnataka State, of which Bangalore is the capital, that both have given infrastructure improvement top priority. Construction work is going on all over the city. But the problem is that modernizing an infrastructure built for a 19th century small town is much more difficult than building a new one suitable for a bustling city of the 21st century. Every nook and cranny of the city is densely populated and no construction activity can be undertaken without causing considerable inconvenience to the residents there. To add to the difficulty, there are politicians always at the ready to cash in on the people’s inconvenience and turn it into vote against the ruling parties in the next election. So if work on infrastructure is slow, those who are in power are only partly to blame.
But they are entirely to blame for the other complaint among the tourists, the complaint about the public transportation system in Bangalore. I am not referring to the fleet of rickety buses that ply on the roads. Though many of them are a blot on the city’s reputation as the IT capital of India, one cannot expect the city administration to order them off the roads overnight. One hopes, though, that the city recognizes the danger those buses pose to public safety and takes remedial measures expeditiously.
What I am referring to is the helplessness foreign tourists, especially those traveling on shoe-string budgets forced to rely on public transportation to move around the city, experience in deciding where a particular bus is going. The signboard on the bus indicating its destination is of little help to them. It is written in Kannada. Those who don’t know Kannada have to seek the help of half a dozed people to make sure they are boarding the right bus. They would find it immensely helpful if the city can order right away that a line be added in English, to what now exists only in Kannada, showing the destination of the bus.
This is not to show any lack of respect for Kannada, the official language of Karnataka State. There is no denying that the primary purpose of public transportation is to serve the public and that all pertinent information should be provided in a language that most of the public understand. The suggestion that a line be added in English is made with a view to seeing Bangalore, which has already earned a place on the tourist map of the world, live up to its reputation. Providing travel-related information in English, in addition to the local language, is a practice that most cities of the world interested in attracting foreign tourists have already have already adopted. Mumbai may be an exception. There, even the numeral indicating the bus route is written in Marathi, derived from Devnagari. (Unless, of course, the prospective traveler has enough time to run to the side of the bus before boarding it. On the side, help is available: the route number is written in Arabic, as is the practice all over the world, and the destination in English.)
Beijing and Shanghai Are Far Ahead
In Beijing and Shanghai, one can go places without knowing even a word of Mandarin. Buses and trains make announcements (pre-recorded) identifying stops and stations in Mandarin as well as English. The public is very helpful, too. The educated among the Chinese seldom miss the opportunity to brush up their English when an English-speaking foreigner approach them with a question.
On the Information Technology Superhighway, Bangalore may be far ahead of Beijing and Shanghai. But in making the city tourist-friendly, it has a long way to go before catching up with the two Chinese cities. And this, in spite of the fact that Indians are more facile with English, the language predominantly used on the Information Technology Superhighway, than the Chinese.
[Published on January 12, 2007.]
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Reader's Response
Whole India Needs to be Modernized
Not only Bangalore, the whole of India needs to be modernized into a human-friendly country. It must get rid of all superstitions. Tourism or no tourism, a minimum, tolerable level of behavioral standards need to be established.
Kulamarva Balakrishna, Vienna, Austria
January 12, 2007