Bengaluru’s urban boom reshapes villages around it

Urbanisation in Bengaluru's outskirts transforms villages into urban sprawls, raising concerns over infrastructure and governance challenges.

Pointing to the high-rises under construction, 70-year-old Muniyamma recalled a starkly different Bagaluru, an urbanised village, off Ballari Road in Bengaluru North taluk. Fifteen years ago, it was a quiet expanse where only a handful of men and women toiled on fertile farmland. But in just over a decade, the village panchayat’s landscape has morphed into an urban sprawl.

Lured by what was then called a “good price” by real estate agents, Muniyamma’s husband sold the small landholding he had for a pittance compared to land prices now. Muniyamma has embraced the inevitable, setting up a small tea stall to sustain her family. “The fields are gone, industries have taken over, and the village’s population has surged beyond anything I could have imagined,” she said.

The catalyst? — Kempegowda International Airport (KIA), established in 2008, at Devanahalli. “Once the airport came up industries followed, paving the way for real estate. The airport is barely 15 km from here, and we are absorbed into Bengaluru,” she said.

Like a cinematic time-lapse capturing the shifting geography of a place, Muniyamma narrated the transformation of Bagaluru: “In the lands where farmers were ploughing to cultivate paddy, clusters of high-rise apartments are being constructed. The billboards have replaced tall trees, narrow roads are widened, and land rates are soaring and with this, the panchayat is absorbing people from outside. The population has increased from about 2,500 to 15,000,” Muniyamma said in one breath.

The tale of Bagaluru is not very different from the stories of 23 other villages around Bengaluru that the State government is planning to integrate with the city’s municipal limits under the proposed Greater Bengaluru Governance Bill, 2024, recently passed in the legislature but now sent back to the government by the Governor seeking clarifications.

These 24 villages remain villages only on paper and are, in fact, completely urbanised, with large tracts of land alienated from agriculture. They now have industries, tech parks, educational institutions, gated communities, and apartment complexes dotting their landscape. The influx of urban migration for work has brought with it a host of urban problems like traffic congestion, heavy loads of sewage and solid waste being generated among other issues.

The rural and town municipal governance structures for these areas are not equipped to handle them. However, the rationale behind the proposal to include these villages in Bengaluru’s civic limits also includes their revenue-generating potential, given the real-estate and development stagnation in the core areas of Bengaluru in the long run.