Bengaluru

Overview

Bengaluru is the administrative capital of Karnataka, the seat of its legislature and high court, and the largest city in South India. It lies towards the southern end of the Deccan Plateau at roughly 900 metres above sea level, which gives it a milder climate than most Indian cities of comparable size.^[1]

The city is known by two names. Bangalore was the English form used officially until 1 November 2014, when the state government changed the official name to Bengaluru, the Kannada form found in a stone inscription from 890 CE at Begur. Both names remain in common use.

Its reputation rests on a cluster rather than a single industry: software services, aerospace and defence electronics, biotechnology, higher education and a large public sector research base, all within a few kilometres of each other.^[1]

Timeline

1. 890 CEThe name Bengaluru appears in a Kannada stone inscription at Begur, the earliest known reference.
2. 1537Kempe Gowda I, a chieftain under the Vijayanagara Empire, builds a mud fort and lays out the town.
3. 1638The Marathas take the town, and the Mughals take it in 1687.
4. 1799The British defeat Tipu Sultan and administer the region from the Madras Presidency.
5. 1909The Indian Institute of Science is founded with support from Jamsetji Tata.
6. 1956The city becomes the capital of the reorganized Mysore State, later Karnataka.
7. 2014The official name changes to Bengaluru.

The technology cluster

The public sector set the foundation: the Indian Institute of Science, the national aerospace laboratories, defence electronics and, from 1969, the headquarters of the Indian Space Research Organisation. Engineering graduates from those institutions supplied the first software firms with their early staff.^[2]

Infosys moved here in 1983 and grew into a global services company, and Wipro and later Texas Instruments, Intel, Accenture and hundreds of others followed. Electronic City, Whitefield and the Outer Ring Road became the corridors where large delivery campuses sit.

The result is a city whose export earnings are dominated by software and business services, and whose traffic, water supply and rental market have struggled to keep pace with the population that came for the work. Analysts have described Bengaluru's growth as one of the fastest among large world cities, and the pressure on infrastructure as the cost of that growth.^[3][5]

Culture, parks and landmarks

• Lalbagh and Cubbon Park, the two large public gardens behind the Garden City name.
• Vidhana Soudha, the seat of the state legislature, and the Attara Kacheri that houses the Karnataka High Court.
• Bangalore Palace, built in the Tudor style in the nineteenth century, and Bangalore Fort, the remains of Kempe Gowda's fortifications.
• Bull Temple in Basavanagudi and the older neighbourhoods of Malleswaram and Basavanagudi, which grew as planned extensions in the late nineteenth century.^[6]
• Namma Metro, the city's rail network, and Kempegowda International Airport, which opened at Devanahalli north of the city in 2008.

Reading the city's numbers

The 2011 census counted 8.4 million people in the city and about 8.5 million in the metropolitan area, making Bengaluru the third most populous city in India and the largest in the south. Later estimates put the urban area well above that, and civic agencies have at times had to work from estimates rather than a census because the last count is more than a decade old.^[4]