The stakeholders also agreed to meet every month virtually, with representatives from industry bodies including Nasscom in attendance.
State IT/BT minister CN Ashwath Narayan, who chaired the 90-minute meeting along with chief secretary Vandita Sharma and Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan late on Wednesday, assured that the flooding issue would be solved by the next monsoon.
About 50 industry representatives attended the meeting. Most were from companies located in the Mahadevapura zone, the worst affected by the downpour since August 30.
“We will ensure that Mahadevapura zone will not face a flood situation again. We will stick to timelines for all infrastructure projects,” Narayan told ET after the meeting.
The government will also remove illegal encroachments of storm water drains, he added.
Discover the stories of your interest
“Everyone agreed that we are all invested in Bangalore, and we will work together to sustain and grow Bangalore,” Gopalakrishnan, who is also chairman of Karnataka’s IT Vision Group, told ET. “We are facing flooding problems in Mahadevapura which the government is aware of and has promised to fix permanently.”
Former director of Infosys TV Mohandas Pai urged the government, in a tweet, to form a committee – led by an additional chief secretary and consisting of civic leaders – that would report to the IT/BT Minister to monitor the progress.
“The agenda of this meeting was not to blame anyone but to figure out how we can restore the brand “Bengaluru” as the leading destination for tech companies,” Nasscom vice president KS Viswanathan told ET.
“The government is looking at creating multiple zonal clusters with the participation of the IT industry. We will have fortnightly meetings over the next few weeks to identify the nature of these initiatives,” he added.
Some of the participants at the meeting offered to help the government with technology and design solutions, as well as talent, to solve the rain-related woes.
The discussions broadly centered on anti-flooding measures, fixing traffic issues in high-density corridors, and sticking to a timeline on public infrastructure projects like the Metro rail.
Some suggested adopting for the Outer Ring Road (ORR) stretch the same administrative model that industries in the Electronic City corridor have been following, such as including industry representatives in the BBMP zonal civic structure.
The 903-acre Electronic City Industries Association is managed by its own civic authority called Elcita. The body has about 300 member companies that pay a monthly fee for the maintenance of the tech suburb.
Ravi Krishnan (Goldman Sachs), Niladri Mishra and Seshadri BC (Infosys), Arindam Banerji (Wells Fargo), Parminder Kakria (Wipro), Manas Das (Intel), Sunil Deshpande (TCS), KS Viswanathan (Nasscom), and Sudhir Sethi (Chiratae Ventures), were among those who attended the meeting.
HC order
Meanwhile, the
Karnataka High Court on Wednesday asked Bengaluru’s civic body BBMP to set up ward-wise grievance cells after residents in the tech suburbs of Mahadevapura and Bommanahalli faced hardships due to the unprecedented rainfall.
A division bench of acting Chief Justice Alok Arade and Justice S Vishwajith Shetty asked the BBMP to notify an engineer for each ward to respond to the grievances.
The City’s previous council had 198 wards, but the same has now been increased to 243 as per a new law.
