Innovative city indeed, but challenges aplenty to retain the global top spot

BENGALURU: The city’s technology industry welcomed the JLL study that ranked Bengaluru as the most dynamic city in the world, but most felt it would be tough for the city to remain on top unless the government invested in improving bandwidth and infrastructure, and took steps to build more science and research institutes in Bengaluru.
Biren Ghose, country head at Technicolor, which has a global animation hub in the city, attributed Bengaluru’s success to its positive and creative mindset in welcoming citizens from all parts of the country.“The success of one industry attracted another,” Ghose said.
Pramod Varma, chief architect at the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI — which developed and manages the Aadhaar identity system), said the city welcomed innovation with an open mind and has funded such ventures. He noted how Team Indus, which is participating in a global competition to send a rover to the Moon, had got philanthropic funding from the city’s tech veterans, including Nandan Nilekani and Sharad Sharma. “It would not have been possible anywhere else. They were not expecting anything in return when they supported Team Indus,” he said.
But Varma also noted that while Bengaluru has great R&D companies, research institutions such as IISc are the exception. “If we cannot build such global institutions, we should let global institutions such as Harvard, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon establish their branches in India by incentivizing them. The central government is trying to open up our higher education, but we need to speed up,” Varma said.
Rahul Narayan, co-founder of Team Indus, said the city needs to foster design thinking as an integral part of delivering technology to the user. “It is critical to becoming the destination that services the needs of the next billion people in the developing world,” he said adding that the city has the culture that embraces new world thinking, encourages risk taking, and doesn’t shy away from moonshots.
Ghose said that any country or city looking at a digital future should have good bandwidth funded by the government.
While most also talked about the challenges of transportation in Bengaluru, Bigbasket founder and CEO Hari Menon said that the drinking water situation in the city is precarious. “Most of the technology suburbs never get piped water supply at all and water levels at borewells are going down dramatically every year,” Menon said.