After several days of heavy rain flooded homes and businesses in two major IT suburbs, the government of Karnataka and IT companies agreed on Wednesday to work together to permanently resolve the water logging problem in the city.
It was also decided that the stakeholders would host a monthly online meeting, involving representatives from industry organizations like Nasscom.
After a 90-minute conference late Wednesday, state IT/BT minister CN Ashwath Narayan assured everyone present that the flooding problem would be resolved by the next monsoon. The meeting was attended by chief secretary Vandita Sharma & Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan.
Fifty or more people from the industry showed up for the meeting. The Mahadevapura area, which has been experiencing the most rainfall since August 30th, was home to the majority of the affected companies.
“We will ensure that Mahadevapura zone will not face a flood situation again. We will stick to timelines for all infrastructure projects,” Narayan said to ET after the conference.
“The government will also remove illegal encroachments of storm water drains”, he added.
“Everyone agreed that we are all invested in Bangalore, and we will work together to sustain and grow Bangalore,” the chairman of Karnataka’s IT Vision Group Gopalakrishnan said to ET.
“We are facing flooding problems in Mahadevapura which the government is aware of and has promised to fix permanently.” TV Mohandas Pai, the Former director of Infosys, in a tweet advised the government to form a council – that will be led by the consisting of civic leaders and additional chief secretary – which would report to the IT/BT Minister to survey 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,” KS Viswanathan, the Nasscom vice president, 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 also said.
KS Viswanathan (Nasscom), Goldman Sachs (Ravi Krishnan), Sunil Deshpande (TCS), Sudhir Sethi (Chiratae Ventures), Niladri Mishra, Manas Das (Intel), Arindam Banerji (Wells Fargo), Parminder Kakria (Wipro), Seshadri BC (Infosys), were among them who joined the meeting.
The Citizens in the tech suburbs of Mahadevapura and Bommanahalli were hit severely by the unusually heavy rainfall, and on Wednesday the Karnataka High Court ordered Bengaluru’s civic body BBMP to establish ward-wise grievance cells. Acting Chief Justice Alok Arade & Justice S Vishwajith Shetty formed a division bench that ordered the BBMP to assign an engineer to each constituency in order to address the complaints.
There were 198 wards in the city council before the new law, but today there are 243.
