31 Emerging Megacities

Ashima Sood

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  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 questions 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 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 19th 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, 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 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.

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  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.

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 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 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 economies. 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”.

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 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 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).

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 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 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 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.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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