India's City Economies
Bengaluru: India's Tech Capital
How Bengaluru grew from a garden city into India's technology hub, the role of public research institutions, and the costs of its rapid growth.
Bengaluru is India’s technology capital.
Roots
- Public sector institutions like HAL, ISRO, BEL and the Indian Institute of Science built a base of engineers from the 1940s onwards.
- Pleasant climate attracted professionals.
The IT boom
- Texas Instruments set up in 1985.
- Infosys moved its headquarters to Bengaluru in 1983 and Wipro expanded there.
- Global firms opened development centres and captive units.
Startup capital
Bengaluru hosts many of India’s unicorns, including Flipkart, Swiggy, Zerodha and others, and a dense investor network.
Global capability centres
Hundreds of global capability centres (GCCs) run by multinationals operate in Bengaluru, doing engineering, research and analytics.
Costs of growth
- Notorious traffic congestion.
- Water shortages, especially the 2024 crisis.
- Lakes lost to construction.
- Flooding, as in 2022.
- Housing costs.
The lesson
Talent and firms cluster, but infrastructure must keep pace or congestion slows growth.
A software engineer in Bengaluru earns a good salary but spends two hours a day in traffic. Firms worry congestion could push talent to other cities.
Public research and defence institutions built its engineering base first.
- Public institutions built Bengaluru's engineering base.
- IT firms and startups made it India's tech capital.
- It hosts many unicorns and GCCs.
- Traffic, water and flooding are costs of growth.
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