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Module 8.3: Emerging Megacities Hyderabad and Bangalore

Role Name Affiliation

National Coordinator

Subject Coordinator

Prof Sujata Patel Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad

Paper Coordinator

Ashima Sood Surya Prakash

Indian School of Political Economy, Pune Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi

Content Writer Ashima Sood

Indian School of Political Economy, Pune

Content Reviewer

Surya Prakash Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi

Language Editor

Ashima Sood

Indian School of Political Economy, Pune

Technical Conversion

Module Structure Sections and headings

Section 1: Introduction

Section 2: Bangalore Bangalore and Bengaluru: Two cities

Local and corporate economies

Speculative governance in Bangalore

Section 3: Hyderabad The making of Cyberabad

Urban Governance in Hyderabad

Growth in the new millennium

In Brief References

Description of the Module Items Description of the Module

Subject Name Sociology Paper Name Sociology of Urban Transformation

Module Name/Title Emerging Megacities

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Module Id 8.3 Pre Requisites Objectives To situate the significance of the

megacities of Bangalore and Hyderabad To position the contemporary growth

trajectory of Bangalore and Hyderabad against the historic context

To empirically ground the major paradigms that have emerged to explain urban growth in Bangalore, such as occupancy urbanism and speculative urbanism

To trace the major thematics of the literature on Hyderabad

Key words (5-6 words/phrases)

Bangalore, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Speculative urbanism, State re-scaling, Occupancy urbanism

Section 1: Introduction South Indian boomtowns -- Hyderabad and Bengaluru (erstwhile

Bangalore) -- represent an important arc in contemporary Indian urbanization.

Bengaluru, growing faster over the 2001-2011 interregnum than Hyderabad,

housed an over 8.5 million, ie, 85 lakh population. Starting at a similar base of

about 5.7 million residents in 2001, Hyderabad grew to a population of over 7.6

million, or 76 lakhs.

These South Indian Information Technology (IT) hubs offer valuable

comparative insight into the forces shaping megacity growth in post-

liberalization India. But they share deeper historical similarities. Unlike the four

biggest metropolises -- New Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras -- both

Bangalore and Hyderabad were situated in princely states. Bangalore fell under

Wodeyar-ruled Mysore state and Hyderabad under the Asaf Jahi Nizam’s

territories. However, both Hyderabad and Bangalore also played host to a

powerful colonial presence, which in both cases spatially bifurcated these cities.

Indeed, in the case of Bangalore, it was the British city -- Bangalore Cantonment -

- which lent its name to the post-colonial Karnataka state capital. So did

Secunderabad leave an indelible impression on Hyderabad’s character.

Over the course of the last century, however, the indigenous cities

emerged triumphant. In Bangalore case, this resurgence was represented in

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symbolic terms by its renaming as Bengaluru. In Hyderabad, too, the axis of

growth has decisively shifted back to the west, from the eastern end of

Secunderabad. Through the course of this module, we flag other similarities and

contrasts in the post-Independence growth of these cities.

This module approaches these two cases through the analytical lens of the

existing scholarship on these metropolises. It asks: what themes and questio ns

have preoccupied scholars who have written about these two cities? And what

similarities and contrasts do these scholarly frameworks illuminate? Which

aspects of the post-liberalization mega-city do they bring to light?

The next section focuses on the case of Bangalore, and the following

section then turns to Hyderabad.

Section 2: Bangalore The scholarship on Bangalore has contributed several important theorizations to

the broader literature on cities in the Global South. Most important have been

the rubrics of occupancy urbanism (Module 4.3) and speculative urbanism

(Module 1.5). This section lays out first the broad outlines of Bangalore’s history,

focusing particularly on issues of spatial inequality discussed by Janaki Nair in

her celebrated 2005 monograph Promise of the Metropolis. It then traces how

these patterns of urban dualism have evolved in contemporary Bangalore by

drawing on the work of Solomon Benjamin and Bhuvaneswari Raman. Finally, it

examines the intensifying trends towards speculative forms of governance and

their repercussions on life in the city.

Bangalore and Bengaluru: Two cities

In Promise of the Metropolis, a definitive history of Bangalore, Janaki Nair argues

that like many Indian cities, Bangalore’s is a tale of two cities – Bengaluru, an

indigenous settlement that dates back five centuries and Bangalore, a

Cantonment that dates to the British era (Nair 2005). It was only in 1949 that

these two halves came together for administrative purposes in Bangalore

Municipal Corporation.

The historic city owes its origins to the fortified settlement, marked by temples

and towns, established by Telugu chieftain Kempegowda in the sixteenth

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century. For nearly 250 years, the new settlement witnessed little growth,

hamstrung partly by the lack of a readily available water supply. In response, the

city’s rulers embarked on a project of tank construction, bequeathing on

Bengaluru the moniker of “Kalyananagara, city of kalyanis or tanks” (Nair 2005,

31). As Module 6.6 shows, these tanks remain central to Bangalore’s unique

urban ecology. Indeed, Nair (2005) argues that supply of water to the old and

new towns undergirded the legitimacy of rule even after the conquest of the city

by the British.

The two cities diverged along many dimensions big and small: from their

economic bases, to their spatial layout to the nature of inter-group relations.

How did the repercussions of these differences play out in the spheres of the

city’s economy, spatial form and relations between ethnic groups? The next few

sub-sections explore these differences.

Economy:

Since the time of Tipu Sultan and before, Bengaluru was a major textile

manufacturing centre, producing a range of cotton and silk cloth for export and

local consumption. Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan later encouraged a thriving

armaments industry.

With the advent of British rule, the first half of the 19 th century saw significant

deindustrialization as the markets for Bangalore’s fine textiles dried out. Its

manufacturing base was only partially revived during the two World Wars with

state support. The city was converted into an inland entrepot by its colonial

rulers. The economy of the British Cantonment “Civil and Military Station”

revolved, with few exceptions, around trade and services (Nair 2005).

Ethnic diversity and strife: The history of Bengaluru was inextricably tied with the history of its

shrines, which were central to city building in India since medieval times. Yet,

even as successive waves of temple patrons, mosque, and church builders

remade the city, relatively little overt conflict marked Bangalore’s

transformations till well into the 20th century (Nair 2005).

The old city was home to a diversity of communities and linguistic groups.

Its composite culture, albeit dominated by Kannada and a lesser extent Urdu,

was woven through by immigrants from across India and elsewhere. In contrast,

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in the Cantonment, English was the language of power. The influx of Tamil and

Telugu migrants as well as Urdu speakers relegated Kannada to relative

marginality in these areas. In response, a more self-conscious interest in

Kannada preservation and propagation became the hallmark of linguistic

identity in colonial and post-colonial Bangalore (Nair 2005).

Did Bengaluru’s traditions of pluralism provide a bulwark against ethnic

conflict? On the one hand, it was not until 1928 that the first Hindu Muslim riots

broke out around a displaced Ganesha shrine. On the other hand, Nair (2005, 72)

argues that these riots revealed the fragility of the ritual ties that bound

communities together. Not long after, the Cantonment also witnessed riots

between the two communities in 1931.

Nair’s account makes clear the multiple layers of social segregation

fostered by the advent of British city-making practices. The period between 1920

and 1940 saw steady growth in caste associations in Bangalore city(Nair 2005).

New philanthropic hostels emerged to cater to the lodging needs of college-going

male migrants of specified castes – whether Brahmin, Nagarth Lingayat,

Vokkaliga or later Vysya and Virasaiva.

It is no surprise then the public sphere that emerged showed similar

segmentation. While establishments such as the Hindu Coffee Club and the

Modern Hindu Hotel facilitated the rise of a public sphere where new ideas of

citizenship and nation building circulated, they ultimately played host to an

exclusively male and Brahmin clientele. Even avowedly liberal associations such

as the Gokhale Institute of Public Affairs (GIPA) remained limited by their

membership to a Brahminical and conservative approach to the challenges of

nation building.

Paradoxically, although exclusionary clubs and hotels catering to

Europeans also existed in the Cantonment area, the Cantonment also allowed

freer and more anonymous forms of social intercourse. Yet, the divide between

the city and the cantonment remained the most durable form of segregation, and

one that created other social fissures in its wake (Nair 2005).

Spatial form:

The Cantonment from its beginnings epitomized the aesthetics and social

agendas of colonial planning. The spatial division of groups, whether European

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or Indian, was a key component of these plans. In contrast to Bengaluru, the

European areas were subject to strict zoning and separation of land uses.

European officials lived in spacious compounds, designed to emphasize the

distance between the ruler and the ruled, even as the native areas within the

Cantonment resembled the spatial patterns of the native city.

To take another striking difference, the Indian city favoured the

pedestrian, but the Cantonment’s thoroughfares were geared towards meeting

the needs of automobile traffic and coordinated mobility.

As Module 3.2 contended, colonial notions of planning proved triumphant

in pre- and post-Independence Bangalore, like in other Indian cities. A major

impetus for spatial planning came from the plague of 1898. By the 19th century,

all extensions to the city were based on the grid plan. In addition to layouts such

as Basavangudi and Malleswaram, the native areas of the Cantonment were also

reconstructed on new lines. The Knoxpet area opposite the Cantonment railway

station became in 1923 the site of an unprecedented planning intervention into

working class habitation, with the construction of Murphy Town, consisting of

both double and single houses.

Nair (2005) suggests that the physical form of the new city may have

exacerbated patterns of segregation in comparison to the old city, where the

basis of co-living was not caste per se but community and occupation. Indeed,

caste and class exclusion was central to the design and evolution of areas such as

Basavangudi and Malleswaram.

Against the backdrop of this reconfigured urban consciousness, British

plans to return of the Cantonment to Mysore State drew protests from groups

loyal to the British – the Anglo-Indians, as well as some Muslim and commercial

Hindu communities. Interestingly the Kannada speaking Muslims of the city and

the Urdu-speaking Muslims of the Cantonment found themselves on opposite

ends of these protests, with the former fiercely loyal to the Wodeyars of Mysore

and the latter aligned with the British.

Post-Independence, the amalgamation and creation of the unified

municipal corporation for Bangalore did not so much erase the legacy of urban

dualism as displace the dichotomy onto different spheres and spatialities. These

fissures are examined in the next section.

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Local and corporate economies

Placing the emergence of scholarship on Bangalore city within the broader

evolution of urban studies in India, Nair (2005) notes that the early post-

colonial decades saw relatively little scholarship on the city. However, a new

resurgence in Bangalore scholarship began in 2000 with the coming together of

new scholars and collaborations. Several authors, Nair among them (2005, 20)

explored how the “ideas of citizenship evolved as the city was reconfigured in

response to the claims of the nation, the region and global capital.”

One of the most influential of theorizations to emerge from scholarship on

Bangalore has been Benjamin’s conceptualization of “occupancy urbanism”.

While Module 4.3 examines the occupancy urbanism thesis in detail, this section

aims to lay out its empirical grounding in contemporary Bangalore. Benjamin did

not articulate the concept of “occupancy urbanism” till a 2008 paper, but the

thesis owed its empirical foundations to an extended multi-year study. Benjamin

and Raman (2001) include richly detailed case studies of Bangalore

neighbourhoods such as Valmiki Nagar, KR Market and the BTM Layout.

A key insight of this work was that the burgeoning small and tiny

enterprises in sectors such as silk weaving, garments manufacture as well as

services, were almost entirely concentrated in non-masterplanned areas

(Benjamin 2000). This had two major repercussions: first, it allowed a mixing of

land uses in a manner that would not be possible in formally planned areas.

Using the case of Valmiki Nagar, an unplanned neighbourhood in north

Bangalore, Benjamin (2000, 44) argued that such ‘“messy” settings are critically

important for employment generation. They allow enterprises to start up and to

find relatively cheap land with loose land use regulations.”

A second repercussion of the lack of planning was that land and

infrastructure issues become politicized. These “local economies” therefore

evolved in a symbiotic relationship with local governance processes embodied in

municipal politics. Councillors and the lower bureaucracy function as mediating

agencies in building ground-level alliances to advance the interests of actors. It

should be evident

In contrast to such local economies stood “corporate economies”,

consisting of masterplanned sites such as “’enclaved’ high-income

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neighbourhoods… of south and south-east Bangalore, … the corporate business

centre of MG Road, and the exclusive urban design mega-projects such as the

information technology park” (Benjamin 2000, 45). These economies were

associated with a very different mode of institutional governance, one that was

mediated by state government parastatal agencies, including development

authorities such as the Bangalore Development Authority.

Benjamin (2000) contrasted three areas to illustrate the ways in which

this division manifested itself in Bangalore. In areas such as Mysore Road and

Yashwantpur in west and north-west Bangalore, respectively, dense local

economies predominated. The strength of local alliances made efforts at land

acquisition for masterplanning a non-starter. But on the other hand, “the diverse

tenure regime allow[ed] for even very poor groups to establish themselves in

locations that provide[d] jobs and livelihood opportunities” (Benjamin 2000, 47).

Urban space in South Bangalore, on the other hand, was produced by land

acquisition and masterplanning. Since masterplanning involved strict land use

regulation, there were few mixed use spaces to support the rich diversity of

tenures and livelihoods seen in west and north Bangalore.

Yet, masterplanned areas comprised only about 20% of Bangalore’s area,

according to Benjamin’s (2000) estimate. In this scenario, megaprojects in the

non-masterplanned areas, such as flyovers and New Market in the KR Market

area, presented a more potent threat to local economy clusters. These projects

were part of a larger trend towards “the promotion of large development

projects in both central city areas and also the urban periphery” (P 51). As

examples, Benjamin considered the then new international airport, flyovers and

ring road highway construction, as well as the International Technology Park.

What united these projects was the role of state government parastatal bodies,

as well as increasing appeal to overtly “non-political” technocratic expertise in

formulating and realizing these plans.

The growing prominence of these “corporate economies” forms the focus

of another leading paradigm to emerge from Bangalore studies: Michael

Goldman’s work on speculative urbanism. We examine the transformations

underlined by Goldman in the next section.

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Speculative governance in Bangalore

If Bangalore was pensioner’s paradise in the early decades after

Independence, the trajectory of the city in the new millennium, Nair (2005, 19)

argues, makes visible the assertive redefinition of “urban space by capitalism”.

This reconfiguration is indeed characteristic of the metropolitan growth model

of both Hyderabad and Bangalore.

How has capitalism configured urban space in Bangalore? One set of

answers comes from Michael Goldman’s model of “speculative urbanism”, which

bears a close kinship to David Harvey’s analysis of the speculative tendencies

inherent in “entrepreneurial governance”. Goldman (2011, 234) argues that the

pre- IT boom Bangalore did not display the pathologies of the “third world”

megacity, “teeming with uncontrollable violence, wrenching poverty, and fetid

living”. Quite to the contrary, late 1980s Bangalore was a quintessentially

“middle class town”, buoyed by an economy organized around public sector

enterprises in “high-end” research and manufacturing, in sectors such as

“aeronautics, space research, radar and remote sensing, military equipment, and

factory tool-making” (p 235). Enterprises such as BEL (Bharat Electronics Ltd.),

HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd.), ITI (Indian Telephone Industries), HMT

(Hindustan Machine Tools), BHEL (Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd.), and Mysore

Industrial and Testing Laboratory, and the Indian Institute of Science provided

secure and unionized employment, high quality housing and public amenities –

schools, hospitals, parks and community centres – and formed the basis of a

vibrant middle class.

These were the conditions that attracted both Indian and multinational IT

firms to set up shop in Bangalore, often in the previously undeveloped southern

and eastern peripheries of the city. And paradoxically, it was greater integration

into global capital circuits that led to a proliferation of megacity problems –

rising socio-spatial inequality, growing slums and public services stretched to

their limits - in a city that had previously remained immune to them.

Goldman (2011, 236) contends that much of the blame for this botched

“worlding” process goes to the new coalitions of actors that came to dominate

urban planning and policy in Bangalore – “the Confederation of Indian Industry

and NASSCOM, the software industry’s chamber of commerce), professionals

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from the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and bilateral aid agencies,

Indians living abroad, internationally connected NGOs, and India’s elite urban

bureaucrats and officials”.

The growing power of this coalition was also accompanied by the

weakening, through a variety of channels, of the “localized set of political

manoeuvres” (Goldman 200, 239), documented by Benjamin and discussed in

the last sub-section. What were processes associated with this attenuation? First,

work by Kamath, Baindur and Rajan (2008) suggests how the expansion of the

city to incorporate “seven surrounding towns and 110 villages” led to a dilution

of representation (Goldman 2011, 239), as these urban local bodies were

dissolved into the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP): where once

every elected official represented 300 citizens, the ratio was now closer to

1:30,000 (Goldman 2011, 239).

This process of attrition of electoral democratic decision-making was also

accompanied by the establishment and empowerment of parastatals, which

controlled basic services and were increasingly beholden to loans from IFIs.

Another strand of the depoliticization of urban governance in Bangalore

could be traced to the emergence of expert commissions and taskforces, such as

most famously the “Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF), a fifteen-member

nominated body of elites from the IT and biotechnology industries” (Goldman

2011, 240). Inaugurated in 1999, the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF), was

a “collaborative movement” that went beyond the municipal channels for

participative governance provided by the 74th Constitutional Amendment to

apply a corporate governance regime to the city (Nair 2005: 15). Interestingly,

Nair (2005) connects the emergence of the BATF to the model of citizenship

proposed by M Visveswaraya, Mysore’s “engineer-statesman” – “citizens as

stockholders of the city corporation.” These tendencies were exacerbated by the

vocal presence of elite citizen groups (Module 6.4). Goldman (2011) argues that

taken together, these three trends constituted the privatization of government

functions and their transfer to non-elected agencies.

These trends converged most consequentially in three megaprojects –

“the Bangalore–Mysore Infrastructure Corridor (BMIC), the IT corridor, and the

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Bangalore International Airport and its surrounding development area (BIAL)”

(Goldman 2011, 241). Here parastatals such as the Karnataka Industrial Areas

Development Board (KIADB) took on the task of acquiring, developing and

transferring land for real estate development. The three megaprojects represent

a remarkable expansion of Bengaluru, to encompass an area larger than the city

limits in 2007 (Goldman 2011, 242). They’re thus key components of the city’s

growth dynamic. The BMIC plans, for example, five new privately built townships

and multiple industrial parks on the stretch between Bangalore and Mysore.

A major cog in Bangalore’s urban transformation has been its IT sector. As

Goldman (2011) explains, critical to the growth of IT firms such as Infosys is the

vast gap in wages between American and Indian workers. By paying Indian

workers a fraction of what they earned, these firms were able to achieve

fabulous profits, which they then reinvested in real estate, in the form of “high

value land banks”. Thus, according to Goldman, even the productive energies of

the new services economies have been diverted to the cause of real estate

development, the pivotal economic activity in an era of speculative urbanism.

While speculative urbanism as thoery is examined in detail in Module 1.5,

this module has focused on what it tells us about contemporary Bangalore. In

many ways, Goldman’s emphasis on the circuits of global capital that have made

Bangalore stands in contrast to Benjamin’s attention to local eco nomies. Other

work in this vein such as Halbert and Rouanet (2014, 2015) adds empirical detail

and complication to this contrast by highlighting the role played by local

developers in “filtering away” some of the risks associated with the “landing” of

global finance capital in Bangalore’s real estate markets.

These authors argue nonetheless that the global “investment frenzy”

(Halbert and Rouanet 2015, 12) “has led to conflict-ridden urban development”.

On the one hand, the availability of finance capital has helped ramp up land

acquisition and the scale of construction projects manifold within Bangalore and

in other Karnataka cities. Among the beneficiaries have been builders such as

Prestige and Sobha. The result has been a spatial reconfiguration, and also

increasing fragmentation of the city between 2005-11 (Halbert and Rouanet

2015, 23), as areas such as Whitefield or Electronic City have seen a rapid

“transformation… from village to edge city”.

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Section 3: Hyderabad With a population of over 76 lakhs per Census of India 2011, Hyderabad

is expected to grow to a behemoth of 1.9 crores by 2041 (Das 2015, 48).

Covering an area of over 7000 square kilometre, Hyderabad’s Metropolitan

Development Authority (HMDA) is now the second largest urban development

area in the country after Bangalore (Sood 2016).

Although the area witnessed human settlement for a millennium or more,

the historic city of Hyderabad traces its establishment on the Musi River to 1591

and the reign of the Qutb Shahi kings. By the time of India’s Independence,

however, the city had gained eminence as the capital of the princely state of

Hyderabad under the Asaf Jahi Nizam dynasty (Das 2015). As in Bangalore, the

construction of large tanks was critical to the growth of early Hyderabad. Chief

among these were “Hussain Sagar, Mir Alam, Afzal Sagar, Jalpalli, Ma-Sehaba

Tank, Talab Katta, Osmansagar and Himayatsagar” (Ramachandraiah and Prasad

2004, 5).

Overall, Hyderabad’s growth path in pre-Independence days seems

ostensibly less typical of the dualism wrought by colonial urban planning.,

although the divergence between levels of public services provision in the

colonial city and the “native” city that was so salient in cities ruled by the British

did found some echo in the Secunderabad Cantonment’s distinct identity and

mode of governance. Not until 1960 did the Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad

come to subsume both Hyderabad and Secunderabad cantonment areas within

one overarching local government (Das 2015). Even today, the army cantonment

areas remain outside the jurisdiction of the present-day Greater Hyderabad

Municipal Corporation.

In 1956, Hyderabad city was declared the state capital of the newly

formed state of Andhra Pradesh, created through the merger of the Nizam’s

Telugu-speaking territories with the Telugu areas of former Madras Presidency

(Das 2015). Even more than Bangalore, Hyderabad in the post-Independence

period emerged as a higher education hub for the nation and the region. In

addition to the central University of Hyderabad, which falls under the central

government’s remit, the city is also home to Osmania University, founded in

1917 in the Nizami era. It has also benefited from a large public sector presence

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that has spurred a boom in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors (Seminar

2009).

Over the years, the growth in employment opportunities brought in a new

wave of migrants from coastal Andhra who also “entered into the business of

cinema production and distribution, education and print and electronic media

sector” (Das 2015, 49). A division emerged at this time between the urbanscapes

of the new areas, populated by the new arrivals – “wide roads, shopping and

trading complexes along with new residential areas” – and the older parts of the

city and Secunderabad area, which housed the long-standing residents of the

city.

These differences were mirrored in the larger state polity. Overtime, the

cultural and class chasm between the Telugu speakers of the former Nizam’s

territories, where Hyderabad was located, and the wealthier Telugu speakers of

the former Madras Presidency grew wide enough to lead to the bifurcation of the

state of Andhra Pradesh. Telangana retained Hyderabad, while the now

truncated Andhra Pradesh committed to building a new capital in the vicinity of

Vijayawada, in Amaravati. Nonetheless, Hyderabad continues as the temporary

capital of Andhra Pradesh for the next decade.

Despite its unique “Ganga Jumni tehzeeb” and confluence of cultures (Latif

2009), Hyderabad gained fame more as an economic and political powerhouse

for its region. Hyderabad, Rangareddy and Medak districts, which comprise the

major chunk of the peri-urban expanses of the HMDA, together contributed 55%

of the state of Andhra Pradesh state’s revenues in 2012-13 right before

bifurcation (Rao 2013, 39). For the new state of Telangana, the corresponding

share of capital revenues contributed by the three districts to the state revenues

is even starker at about 80%. As Das (2015) notes, Hyderabad represents a

primate city for the state, with a size advantage so great that it creates a virtuous

cycle that spurs faster growth, at the expense of the smaller urban centres.

If Bangalore’s explosive growth trajectory in the late 1980s owed a debt

to the initiative of the IT industry, Hyderabad’s emergence as an IT hub has been,

to a far greater extent, a state-led endeavor. In the aftermath of the International

Monetary Fund-mandated liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991, Andhra

Pradesh was one of the first states to seize the opportunities offered by the new

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economic reforms regime (Kennedy 2007). Das (2015) and Bunnell and Das

(2010) recount how a visit to Southeast Asia – particularly Kuala Lumpur’s

Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) was the inspiration for the then Chief Minister

Chandrababu Naidu to inaugurate Hyderabad Information Technology and

Engineering Consultancy (HITEC) City on the western outskirts of Hyderabad. In

2001, Cyberabad Development Area was established to support the development

of an IT-focused enclave around and beyond HITEC City (Das 2015, Kennedy

2007).

HITEC City thus represents a clear articulation of the city as growth

engine strategy (Kennedy 2007). Spatially, it heralded an ongoing era of rapid

westward advance for Hyderabad’s growth (Maringanti 2013b). Even though

Cyberabad Development Area receives an implicit subsidy from Hyderabad, in

the form of the housing and education the latter provides for Cyberabad’s

workforce, the relationship between Cyberabad enclave and 400-year old

Hyderabad has remained ambivalent (Maringanti 2013b).

The making of Cyberabad Kennedy (2007, 2014) has detailed the patterns of spatial restructuring

that shaped the development of Cyberabad. Its earliest outpost -- HITEC City --

represented a “premium networked space” (Graham 2000) – focused on the

creation of “high performance infrastructures”, it was globally connected, but

largely disconnected from local economies (Kennedy 2014:131).

“World-class” infrastructure provision is a key component of the city-

centric growth strategy set into motion by the Chandrababu Naidu government.

Its other major element was a targeted policy framework for the IT sector, which

provided a variety of tax incentives and subsidies. The panoply of incentives also

included two that had a direct spatial correlates: rebate on land, and exemption

from zoning regulations. These exemptions applied also to private and public IT

parks, which were also subject to regulations on infrastructure provision:

“minimum area of 4000 square meters, provision of telecommunication

infrastructure such as optic fibre connectivity, and access to the satellite earth

station”, “100% on-site power back-up… air-conditioning and parking, as well as

24-h security” (Kennedy 2007, 99).

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Comprised of three major complexes – Cyber Towers, the first to be completed in

1998, Cyber Gateway (2001) and Cyber Pearl (2004) – HITEC gave a concrete

spatiality to this policy thrust. Two features of this project are important: first

was the key role of the Andhra Pradesh Industrial Infrastructure Corporation, a

state government parastatal. Provisioning the land for private investors to set up

in HITEC City by entering into public-private partnerships with the private

developers, and functioning as the “deemed local body” for the HITEC City area –

through these functions, the APIIC was key to realizing the entrepreneurial

vision of Naidu’s Hyderabad, but as part of a broader architecture constituted

around the Cyberabad Development Area (Kennedy 2014).

Second was the way in which public and private actors came together in

the making of HITEC City. Not only was HITEC City built through a public-private

partnership model, with APIIC providing the land and the private promoter the

capital and management, as much as 50% of the land in HITEC City was set aside

for private companies to build on (Kennedy 2007).

Advancing this growth strategy, the Andhra Pradesh government

designated the Cyberabad Development Area (CDA) in 2001, covering an area of

52 square kilometres in the outer Serilingampally Municipality. The CDA was

masterplanned as a “model enclave” with high levels of infrastructure and public

services provision (Kennedy 2007, 102). This period also saw a major push

towards transport infrastructure development, with an expansion of the

suburban commuter train network to encompass these new western extensions

of the city, as well as the construction of the outer ring road.

Further plans to build a “knowledge corridor”, skirting the city along its

western, south-western and southern borders, as well as an international airport

in a designated Hyderabad Airport Development Authority (HADA) plan area

evinced a clear resemblance to the megaprojects focus documented by Goldman

(2011) in the Bangalore case. Nonetheless, bringing to bear different theoretical

lenses on this growth strategy has allowed a different set of insights to emerge.

Employing a state rescaling framework (Module 1.5), Kennedy (2007,

106) argues that the CDA and HADA represent “‘‘glocal fixes’’, i.e. place-specific

production complexes, which are the outcome of a strategic approach to

infrastructure development that seeks to facilitate capital accumulation through

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intense global-local interaction.” Thus, Kennedy’s work underlines the role of

“special purpose vehicles” in “positioning Hyderabad as a “competitive region”

since the era of liberalization” (Sood 2016a).

Urban Governance in Hyderabad Urban governance in contemporary Hyderabad, like other Indian cities

remains fragmented over multiple agencies. The spatial planning architecture in

Hyderabad has undergone radical change over the last decade. First, the CDA and

the HADA were dissolved in 2008 to form an integrated Hyderabad Metropolitan

Development Authority (HMDA). The premier planning agency for the

metropolitan region, the HMDA encompassed an area over ten times the GHMC,

making it the second largest urban development area in India after the Bangalore

Metropolitan Region Development Authority (Sood 2016). The formation of the

HMDA was preceded by the incorporation of GHMC in 2007, bringing together

12 pre-existing municipalities and eight Gram Panchayats into the Municipal

Corporation of Hyderabad (Kennedy 2014).

Political motivations may have guided such “territorial amalgamation”

(Scott 2001:4 quoted in Kennedy 2014:121). The GHMC helped undercut the

electoral dominance of the Hyderabad City-based Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

(MIM) and created an autonomous administrative entity for the economically

significant Hyderabad region in anticipation of the split between Andhra Pradesh

and Telangana. Yet, the formation of the GHMC did not imply any major

devolution of decision-making power to the municipal body (Kennedy 2014);

indeed, much as in the case of Bangalore, state parastatals such as the APIIC

remained ascendant (Sood 2016). Kennedy (2014) has argued that the HITEC

City enclaves serve as a vehicle for “technocratic management”, and help keep

“competitive regions” protected from messy democratic claims.

More recent work in this vein by Sood (2016a) highlights the role of

specialized governance frameworks in facilitating such bypass of elected

municipal institutions. In Andhra Pradesh and Telangana state, the Industrial

Area Local Authority (IALA) represents one such instrument, which devolves

municipal powers, including the power to collect property taxes, and functions in

industrial areas to the state Industrial Infrastructure Corporation. This

17

devolution has faced serious contestation over property tax collections and

jurisdiction from the municipal corporation in recent years (Sood 2016a).

Neoliberal urbanism in Hyderabad? The scholarship on Hyderabad, though not as extensive as the literature

on Bangalore, provides a useful counterpoint to analyses generated by the latter.

In addition to the growing literature on urban governance, three arenas in which

urban scholarship on Hyderabad has contributed significant insight include first,

the real estate dynamics and tussles over tenure that shape the peri-urban

frontier; second, the transformations in urban ecology; third, the struggles over

land around mega infrastructure projects.

Maringanti’s (2013a) work highlights the labyrinthine system of land

tenure that complicates the project of real estate development on the rural-

urban interface in Hyderabad. In a scenario where a variety of land rights co-

exist and land records on the ground remain incorrect and incomplete, locally

embedded actors and communities become pivotal in attempts to convert

agricultural land on the urban fringe into new forms of property development

(Maringanti 2013a). In peri-urban Ghatsekar, site of Maringanti’s study, lavani

or D-form pattas predominate. These assign inheritable usufruct rights to

peasants, but cannot be sold to third parties. Negotiating the sale of these lands

to developers has thus emerged as a fast-growing source of employment in peri-

urban Hyderabad.

Other tensions around urban growth have emerged, as in Bangalore,

around the man-made system of lakes that have shaped Hyderabad (Maringanti

2011) (See also Module 6.6). Ramachandraiah and Prasad highlight the alarming

erosion of drinking water sources such as Hussainsagar, Osmansagar and

Himayatsagar by real estate encroachments and the damage done to lakes by

pollution.

Ramachandraiah (2009) has taken a more activist stance on the public–

private nexuses that shape contemporary Hyderabad. Focusing on the

repercussions of the collapse of the IT major Satyam on the metro rail project

headed by its real estate arm Maytas, Ramachandraiah (2009) argues that

inequitable forms of real estate development are the “knife-edge of neoliberal

urbanism” (See also Module 3.4). The infrastructure megaproject, and the tussles

18

it provokes, together thus comprise an important theme in the literature on

Hyderabad.

In Brief In the last two decades, Bangalore and Hyderabad have emerged as

quintessential new economy powerhouses. Their growth paths reveal the

economic forces that have shaped post-liberalization India. Not surprisingly,

these cities have also inspired a large body of research exploring the social,

economic and political ramifications of these dynamics. The explosive growth of

both cities in the last few decades exemplifies the trajectory of city-centric

growth strategies, yet scholars have brought to bear a variety of theoretical

frameworks to analyse these policy pathways.

The scholarship on Bangalore, in particular, has inspired powerful paradigmatic

analyses such as occupancy urbanism and speculative urbanism. This module

has attempted to explore the empirical grounding of these paradigms in

contemporary Bangalore. For example, Benjamin’s framing of occupancy

urbanism emerged from the remarkable contrast between the masterplanned

and non-masterplanned parts of Bangalore city, and the divergent economic and

political configurations they support.

Similarly Goldman’s analysis of speculative governance draws intimately on the

transformations that characterized urban governance landscape of Bangalore,

especially the increasing prominence of international financial institutions (IFI)

and elite taskforces, as well as the workings of IT firms.

Arguably, the polity of the princely states of Mysore and Hyderabad diverged

significantly from the colonial patterns manifested in the cities of Delhi, Mumbai,

Kolkata and Chennai. Nonetheless, neither Bangalore nor Hyderabad has

escaped from the logics of dualism that typify the Indian city. If the contrast

between masterplanned and non-masterplanned has emerged as a key axis of

polarization in Bangalore, in Hyderabad, too, the state promotion of the IT sector

has led to enduring schisms between Cyberabad and its older neighbour

Hyderabad. As exemplar par excellence of a city-centric growth strategy, the case

of Hyderabad has highlighted the governance, ecological, economic and spatial

correlates of IT-led growth.

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Our survey of the literature on these emerging megacities has left untouched

many important strands, for instance Upadhya’s (2009, 2006, 2007)

ethnographic investigation of the IT workforce in Bangalore. Nonetheless, this

module has aimed to underline the key significance of these two cities in

manifesting the “knife-edge of neoliberal urbanism” (Ramachandraiah 2009).

.

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