It’s fitting that someone in Bengaluru built a live crowdsourced map of the city’s potholes. It’s a fascinating artefact to spend some time with. Zoom in and out, and the location pins stop looking like data points and more like a bleeding wound. Thousands of these little nicks are along the Outer Ring Road, the spine holding India’s tech capital in place, home to 40 per cent of the country’sventure capital funding. They signify an inflamed gash running through the city’s most valuable real estate.
This is the city that has just proposed a congestion tax.
Starting with the Outer Ring Road, the Karnataka government plans to levy a charge on single-occupancy vehicles, automatically deducted via FASTag. Commuters driving alone will have to pay, while those that carpool with two or more people will be exempt.
The proposal was discussed at a high-level meeting chaired by Karnataka Chief Secretary Shalini Rajneesh alongside industry leaders like Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Yulu co-founder RK Misra, and urban designer Naresh Narasimhan. The proposal was floated at a meeting that aimed to come up with a 90-day roadmap to improve Bengaluru’s crumbling infrastructure.
Also read: No other city is like Gurugram—‘so mismanaged, yet so highly spoken of’
A borrowed model for who?
The proposed tax is textbook congestion pricing that aims to shift passenger traffic to public transport, encourage ride-sharing, and decongest the roads. Congestion taxes have existed in high-density cities like London, Singapore, and New York (although they are frequently criticised in those cities too). Thriving metropolises should not have to deal with an onslaught of privately owned vehicles.
On paper, all of these are great ideas – for places that are not India. In practice, this is how you invoice a victimised population for government failure.
Unsurprisingly, no one outside of that meeting thinks this is a good idea. Regular citizens and transport experts have converged on a single assessment. As entrepreneur TV Mohandas Pai put it, “Congestion tax without good public transport is punishment, not policy.” You cannot tax people into using alternatives that don’t exist.
And good alternatives very much don’t exist. Namma Metro carries 7.5 lakh commuters daily and runs at an operational profit, which is proof that Bengaluru wants public transport. Fares went up more than 100 per cent this year. But the system is crippled by a coach shortage so severe that completed lines – like the recently opened Yellow Line connecting Electronic City – have been forced to sit idle. Last-mile connectivity remains a problem.
Also read: India’s poor little rich people have it so bad. Money just can’t buy them freedom
As Bengaluru transformed
You’re always within earshot of a conversation about Bengaluru’s notorious traffic. In the early 2000s, when the “Garden City” was slowly morphing into India’s tech hub, burgeoning traffic was fodder for many standup comedians. Throughout those exciting years, you just accepted the traffic as a minor annoyance in a well-loved, buoyant city, throbbing with optimism and opportunity.
Since the 2020s, however, the laughter has dissipated. It has been replaced by an overwhelming miserable hopelessness.
Bengaluru’s tech boom didn’t materialise out of thin air. The city’s foundation was laid in 1911, when M Visvesvaraya, the Diwan of Mysore, called for state-led industrial growth at the Mysore Economic Conference. Decades of deliberate institution-building followed: Government Sandalwood Oil Factory (the producer of Mysore Sandal Soap) in 1916, the Government Porcelain Factory in 1932, and after Independence, strategic central PSUs like Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, Indian Telephone Industries, and Bharat Electronics Limited.
These little ecosystems came with townships, training institutes, and research centres that built a massive pool of skilled engineers. When IT companies arrived post-liberalisation in 1991, they inherited this skilled workforce and institutional infrastructure. But unlike the PSU era, which came with integrated planning, the tech boom brought exponential growth without the governance infrastructure to manage it.
“People have just become angrier, because they have been put into these pressure-cooker situations,” said Arjun Rajkishore, a principal product designer who was born in Bengaluru and has watched it unravel over the last few decades. Even in the early 2000s, when the city was still half “pensioner’s paradise,” the influx of tech companies made it a pleasant place to live. There were excellent restaurants and movie theatres with recliners. “Even going to the mall was a nice experience,” he said. “Now, everyone from the local grocer to people on the road are much more impatient. It has now become ok to beat up people over language.”
The infrastructure forced choices nobody wanted to make. Public transport was so inadequate that Rajkishore had to buy a car. “Now I have become a part of the problem,” he told me. “I would love to be able to take the metro, but the station is a couple of kilometres from my house. Autorickshaws often reject you, and several metro stations don’t have parking.” Rajkishore isn’t hopeful the tax will fix anything, especially when car dependency has been engineered into the system.
But traffic is only a symptom of a deeper malaise in Bengaluru.
Shifting the burden on citizens
The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike has not held elections since 2015. A municipal administrator appointed by the state manages the city – or doesn’t, depending on who you ask. An alphabet soup of several different parastatal bodies like BESCOM, BMTC, BWSSB, and BMRCL theoretically govern Bengaluru, which actually means that nobody is accountable for anything. The city, which has not had a master plan developed for the last 10 years, will now be governed by five different bodies.
Bengaluru’s water crisis alone should be front-page news every day. The Central Ground Water Board reported that in 2024, both urban and rural areas extracted 100 per cent of available groundwater reserves. An IISc report projected that groundwater levels in peripheral areas like Whitefield and southeast Bengaluru would plummet by 20 to 25 meters by mid-March 2025. The region’s rocky aquifers, which don’t hold as much water despite more rainfall than north India, don’t make things any better. I fear that when – not if – the water wars begin in India, Bengaluru is bound to be Ground Zero.
And yet, while Bengaluru struggles to provide drinking water in the summer, the monsoons bring a problem of plenty. Last year, over 2,000 homes were submerged. Areas like Manyata Tech Park were also inundated. As this report pointed out: “Historically, urban planning in Bengaluru and other cities across India has emphasised on the quick removal of stormwater from city limits. Since the drinking water sources to the cities are outside the metropolitan area, urban development strategies prioritised efficient stormwater drainage rather than local water retention or recharge.”
These stormwater drains, known locally as rajakaluve are extremely vulnerable to encroachment by public and private players. In addition, “the disposal of liquid and solid waste has significantly reduced the natural water-holding capacity of the stormwater drains”, which in turn leads to flooding. The city’s natural hydrological system has been destroyed, which means it can neither manage flooding nor recharge the groundwater it’s desperately depleting.
Then there’s the garbage, a persistent problem in our wealthiest metros. Bengaluru generates 4,593 tonnes of solid waste daily, but can process only 1,943.8 tonnes. The deficit just accumulates in parks, lakes, and empty plots of land. Rajkishore told me that you can’t leave trash outside your building or you will be fined even as public bins are missing in most parts of the city. This gap has been filled by local “mafia,” who charge anywhere between Rs 10-50 per week to collect garbage at a predictable time.
The city brings the same level of inspired incompetence to solving its traffic crisis. In December 2024, the BBMP launched a “Comprehensive Bengaluru City Traffic Management Infrastructure Plan” after paying Turkish consultants Altinok Consulting Rs 4.7 crore. The report proposed 170 km of tunnels, double-decker tunnels, elevated corridors, and underpasses. It was withdrawn within weeks after widespread criticism of its “unscientific approach.” The Bengawalk collective noted that exactly zero per cent of the Rs 1.6 lakh crore budget was earmarked for pedestrians or public transport.
In the absence of management from the city, the burden of holding the authorities accountable has fallen on citizens. Remember Caleb Friesen, a Canadian tech influencer and a resident of Bengaluru, whose video of navigating a footpath recently went viral? The Greater Bengaluru Authority swiftly moved to action later, prompting Friesen’s followers to request him to make more videos of unwalkable footpaths. Dushyant Dubey, known on X as St Broseph, has built an army of volunteers to help ordinary citizens deal with civic issues.
London introduced its congestion charge in 2003, but only after expanding its bus network. But Bengaluru seems to be doing this backwards. How is it that a city that cannot manage its waste or water has no problem setting up a FASTag deduction system? Good luck figuring this out while you sit in traffic. Please pay at the toll.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)