“TECH-ADJACENT HOUSING”
A housing typology exemplifying the unequal order that serves Bengaluru’s world-class image
Shoubhik Chatterjee | Abhay Narasimhan | June - August 2024
On the left - Office-cum-Commercial building. On the right - APR tower 1 sharing a private road
Picture: Abhay Narasimhan
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SHORT-FORM ESSAY:
(Narayan Murthy) further elaborated his opinion of Indian Bureaucrats by saying "They are the owners and the managers and this colonial thing carries on even after independence." He identified the specific nature of the problem in a comparative mode: "There are three things that one needs to follow in order to run a company: fairness, transparency and accountability...all of these are very low in the government." In the business world, these words are the basis of corporate governance (Dasgupta 2015: 46).
This quotation is an excerpt from Simantini Dasgupta’s 2015 book ‘Bits of Belonging’ investigating the relationship between Information Technology (IT) and Indian neoliberal governance. Here, she is interviewing Murthy, an influential co-founder of Infosys; a multinational IT-company based out of Bengaluru. In the last three decades, this rapidly-developing city nicknamed the ‘Silicon Valley of India’ has begun adopting a housing typology in Bengaluru’s periphery that embraces IT industry led development. We identify this to be Tech-Adjacent Housing, which challenges Murthy’s claims on ‘fairness’ that corporate governance develops. Instead, through a mixed-method approach (interviews, academic literature and relevant first-hand documents); we present how this housing typology symbolises Bengaluru’s privatised-approach to planning which perpetuates unearned advantages on caste and income-bases.
Township developments are not uncommon to Bengaluru, as both gated enclaves housing upper class groups and public sector employee quarters have been a staple for the city post-independence. However, Tech-Adjacent Housing is unique and relatively new to Bengaluru’s development. Through the inclusion of a spatial juxtaposition - i.e. a close physical proximity between Tech-Parks and Upscale Housing, and their respective spaces fluidly superimposed - it promotes an intimacy between technology and housing. They are often characterised by privately-owned roads connecting a technology park and residential community within the same gates, advertised to promote a westernised way-of-life for the ‘neo-middle class’ (Jaffrelot 2013).
We investigate this intimacy, which then becomes the cause for a series of spatial hierarchies - wherein the urban poor are dissuaded (through economic and cultural means) from accessing a multitude of spaces - within the campus. Such is so due to symbiotic coordinations between its industrial, commercial and residential spaces that appeal to highly-educated high-earning classes.
During Bengaluru’s IT boom, private corporations met the demand for housing; particularly in the IT corridor. Housing developers like Prestige have situated several of their projects (‘Shantiniketan’, ‘Silver Oaks’ and ‘Waterford’) near and inside the International Tech Park (ITPL). Similarly, the case of Divyasree Technopolis (Business Park) and Divyasree ‘77 Place’ and ‘77 East’ conforms to this typology by producing a planned set of enclaves in the HAL-District. The government has continued to grant approval to the expansion of this typology. For instance, in Bagalur, Godrej’s upcoming project ‘Ananda’ describes a proximity with a proposed 950 acre park within which 250 acres will be an Special Economic Zone (SEZ).
To further understand the nuances and impacts of this typology developing in Bengaluru that the state continues to encourage, and private actors keep expanding, we studied the case of Adarsh Palm Retreat (Residential Complex, ‘APR’) and Brookfield Ecoworld (Tech-park). This development is found in the heart of Bengaluru’s IT corridor in Bellandur. As residents of Bellandur, we used our observations and knowledge of the area to conduct primary data collection through interviews with relevant stakeholders that are affected by this Tech-Adjacent Housing on a daily basis.
Rapid Transformation and Inequality in Bellandur
Brookfield Asset Management purchased multiple properties from RMZ including Ecoworld for $2 billion in 2020, the highest-value property deal in Indian history at the time. It would be difficult to imagine that just 25 years prior that an agrarian-focused Bellandur would receive investment of such value. Kamath et al. (2008: 53) cite a Bellandur local’s experience with rapid land-transformation, saying, “You could hear the sound of the bus, of the train, even of foxes. It was like this till the nineties. The ring road came and spoilt this…The impact of the IT sector has also been significant. Night and day there are vehicles. There is one car to drop one person. There is so much noise and air pollution from the commercial development.” APR-Ecoworld is an exemplar of the turn Bengaluru has embraced as a leading global centre for technology. The purchase reveals a continued hope and expectation of development in the same tech-focused direction for the foreseeable future - subject to the government further accepting such expansions. As attestation, the Housing and Land Rights Network (2013: 5) cites that the “private sector has become the most important customer in the urban development market as well as the most important beneficiary of the state’s development policy.”
A polarisation emerges, where Bengaluru’s high-tech zones and industrial parks accessed by the global elite juxtapose informal areas comprising shanty huts and cramped settlements home to daily-wage labourers. The Housing and Land Rights Network (2013: 6) argues that Bengaluru’s rigid Master Plans (in failing to recognise informal settlements) engender, as opposed to reduce, these unrecognised spaces which constitute a majority of the city’s land use. Bengaluru-based NGO Alternative Law Forum elaborates on this, stating that “there almost exist parallel cities within most Indian cities, the city of planned development is marked by official markers of development and legality, while the other unplanned city is often represented in terms of un-orderly development, illegality and chaos.” (ALF 2003: 12)
Bengaluru’s informal settlements have proliferated due to a large influx of migrants hoping for improved job opportunities. The poor residents “are subject to a wide range of stressors” (Deshpande et al. 2019: 176). This includes limited access to basic services and a lack of political negotiating power, leading to constant marginalisation. During India’s turn towards IT (and more generally toward economic liberalisation), the ‘urban poor’ have experienced “the market paradigm …through a pedagogic mission of transforming the “masses” into rational market operators” (Dasgupta 2015: 191). In other words, social inequalities faced by the urban poor are now justified in the name of an alleged efficient, neutral market. Bellandur, as established, is no exception to this phenomenon of rapid changes in demographic and unequal land-use during the city’s neoliberal turn. The Gram Panchayat recognised the Reddy community as owning 50% of the land while the Thigala and SC/ST communities were farmers and worked as daily-wage labourers (Kamath et al. 2008: 29). In conversation, Dr. Vivek Vivek (environmental researcher and resident of APR) told us how farmers and daily-wage labourers had ‘secondary rights’ to the land, where the Reddy community would allow such Dalit/Thigala citizens to continue working on the land for generations through informal, verbal contracts. However, as Bellandur rapidly adopted tech-based development subsequent digitisation of Land Records (Bhoomi) followed, such agreements were abandoned.
Nandan Nilekani, another Infosys co-founder, states in his book ‘Imagining India’ that “a national database for land and property records..would have a dramatic, cleansing effect on land productivity, equity and litigation.” In the case of Bellandur, it has made the issue of equity 'dramatically’ worse. Benjamin et al. (2007: 18-23) elaborate how corruption increased through the introduction of Bhoomi, as large developers have been able to capture land more easily through bribes.
Consequently, local landowners and the landless suffered as unelected parastatal bodies such as BDA and KIADB acted as aggregating intermediaries, selling land to private developers like Adarsh. Bellandur’s land was not purchased without local resistance, with farmers and villagers campaigning together to combat unilateral KIADB and BDA land acquisition and to receive adequate compensation. At times, land was allotted favourably to protesting groups; but success was limited. Instead, large real estate companies brokered with local elites and wealthier landowners to obtain the territory, circumventing direct negotiations with lower-paid locals, Dalit and Thigala communities.
The Visible-Invisible Divide: Labour and Inequality in APR-Ecoworld
Both APR and Ecoworld’s intimidatingly tall walls with barbed wiring, and inaccessibility to the public doesn’t stop the (aforementioned) ‘informal’ from being a part of its biosphere. Marred by constant expansion to continue serving greater populations of the global elite, hundreds of migrant and SC/ST daily-wage labourers occupy the same street spaces that residents and white-collar workers do. A common sight under the 5:00 pm sun in Ecoworld are corporate workers taking their cigarette breaks just a few metres away from the construction workers, never intermingling. Right beside the Shell and Honeywell (two Fortune Global 500 Companies) offices, there remains a small gap in the barbed wall through which construction workers squeeze and climb through to access shoddily-built concrete housing - symbolic of the lack of accessibility essential workers of the township experience.
Doddakannelli Road, colloquially referred to as the ‘APR backroad’, is currently witnessing the extension of APR - called Mayberry. After the monsoon rains, the backroad is difficult to navigate due to the mess of cars, and broken footpaths with exposed drains. Peeping into the muddy APR Mayberry construction zone, one sees a segregated portion for worker-housing, which can be characterised by cramped ramshackle buildings with little-to-no common spaces for the low-wage workers. According to a study in 2008, male labourers earned the minimum wage of 80 Rupees while women received an even-lower 60 Rupees as their daily wage (Kamath et al. 2008: 33). Clearly, temporarily-housed low-wage labourers (typically hailing from lower-caste backgrounds) are extremely vulnerable in Bengaluru. Adarsh and Brookfield builders employ these workers on informal low-paying contracts and provide basic services such as housing, electricity and water at their own mercy, leaving little agency for the employed groups to enjoy rights such as the ‘Right to Live with a Working Wage’ or ‘Right to Dignity’.
In Bengaluru, the “politician-bureaucrat-developer nexus” (Bhagia & Bose 2024: 449) has facilitated a ‘state-facilitated market-rule’ (Chatterji 2013: 274) approach to urban development. This is apparent through the encouragement of business-friendly environments where housing is increasingly viewed as an ‘investment vehicle’ rather than a social good. A characteristic of Tech-Adjacent Housing, therefore, is a failure to provide adequate relief and institutional support to essential low-wage workers that sustain the accumulation of capital for market winners. By consequence, an unrestricted perpetuation of exclusion exists and continues against these groups whose days are marred by uncertainty and limited access to basic resources.
“On the periphery”, on the left side, one can see the tall walls and barbed wires of APR-Ecoworld
- an exemplar of ‘informal’ spaces accompanying planned developments
Picture: Abhay Narasimhan
Picture: Abhay Narasimhan
Meanwhile, the image presented to the residents and corporate elite couldn’t be more different. After entering APR’s main entrance, noise levels drop dramatically as privately-employed security guards coordinate which column of cars and bikes are allowed to enter and exit the facility. Clear, wide roads lined by neatly trimmed hedges direct you to expanses of glass in office buildings and commercial spaces. Here, we see the systematic removal of the urban poor from socio-spatial considerations in order to maintain the so-called “world-class” nature (Nair 2000) of facilities and public goods afforded to the residential network of APR. The authors posit, after interviewing residents, that for them, this housing typology exists as a comfortable bubble away from the busy city. More implicitly, the design of APR-Ecoworld keeps away from this ‘bustle’ by rendering invisible informal settlements that are associated with lower-caste stigmas of uncleanliness and disorder.
Newly-built Commercial zone of APR-Ecoworld developed by Brookfield
Picture: Abhay Narasimhan
Splintering the urban fabric
In this case study, APR-Ecoworld serves at the technological frontier of ‘planned development’, while surrounding conglomerations of migrant lower-wage and lower-caste workers are restricted by the physical and symbolic barbed walls of the enclave. By splintering the urban landscape, it forms a premium networked space within the enclave (Idiculla 2016: 107) wherein surrounding citizens face an unequal provision of infrastructure and services. Consequently, this disparity has led to the ghettoisation of nearby villages.
Map describing the spatial organisation of APR-Ecoworld and its surrounding tech-parks and villages. Note: Black lines describe the borders of walled enclaves, Purple zones indicate tech-parks, Red zones are parts of APR, Green lines indicate public roads, and Red lines indicate private roads
Devarabeesanahalli is the modernised village that APR is found in. The gated community of APR-Ecoworld is systematically inaccessible for other village residents and daily-wage labourers in the area. The private road shared by APR and Ecoworld, initially open to the public, has been closed off to the general public due to protests by APR residents. Now, the brunt of vehicular traffic occurs through its single main road - one of the most traffic-heavy sections in the world’s sixth most congested city. In its design and implementation, APR-Ecoworld is an isolated hub home to quasi-private lakes, lavish gardens and upscale commercial spaces. In fact, the lake in mention, is ‘Devarabeesanahalli’ lake, and yet, by blocking off ways to get to the lake, the remainder of the village can hardly access the lake that shares its name.
Such a typology is characterised by a lack of porosity - any other development must react to as opposed to work with APR-Ecoworld due to the spatial hierarchies that the latter encourages. To term ‘the surrounding’ population as ‘neighbouring’ would do grave injustices in ignoring the hostility of the enclave to the nearby communities. By no means does the enclave display ‘neighbourliness’. Daily-wage workers having to walk kilometres to enter and exit the car-centric APR, while having no provisions for water during their daily travails reveals a lack of interest from this Tech-Adjacent Housing in supporting the population that it inadvertently engenders.
In sum, APR-Ecoworld is synecdochal to Bengaluru’s government state opting to prioritise the private sphere of development. APR-Ecoworld is at the heart of the city’s neoliberal turn towards the global elite without adequate safeguards for the urban poor. As of 2024, Ecoworld is one of Brookefield’s most valuable properties while APR is widely recognised as a high-quality housing complex particularly for tech-workers of the city. Constant government approvals of more apartment complexes, more villas and more offices within APR-Ecoworld campus reveal an unwillingness of the government to strive away from this model of inequitable tech-based development; as marginalised communities continue to fall by the wayside into the peripheries of India’s Silicon Valley.
Housing immediately outside of the compound wall - revealing a lack of porosity of such Tech-Park Adjacent Township Housing as village residents must react and re-adjust to APR-Ecoworld’s constant expansions
Picture: Abhay Narasimhan
In terms of Tech-Adjacent Housing as a new housing typology in Bengaluru, we justify this by looking at similar projects that host parallel effects. Similar patterns in the cases of ITPL and its surrounding Prestige projects, wherein Nexus Shantiniketan mall is composed of globally-renowned brands and eateries that compound the exclusivity of these spatial enclaves. At the same time, Divyasree Technopolis and its accompanying housing reaffirms how the introduction of modernised enclaves can engender the parallel city - where upper class and middle-lower citizens fail to share spaces beyond their professional capacities (ALF 2003: 12).
Tech-Adjacent Townships choose to replicate meant-to-be public facilities within their enclaves, making it accessible to the select few who can afford to live in these upmarket apartment/villa complexes. Privately-built lakes, gardens and seating areas are not uncommon within these gated communities, but are hard to come by elsewhere in the peripheries (to which Bengaluru’s IT sector lies).
This typology can be characterised further by private roads shared by a Hi-Tech Industrial Zone as well as an upscale gated community, often consisting of high-rise apartments and/or villas. Such an enclave-style planning often uses ring fences, and results in a lack of porosity to the outside world. This exclusionary nature is further accentuated by car-oriented accessibility and little-to-no truly-public infrastructure. For instance, APR-Ecoworld has been plagued by continuous construction and road divisions that have made sure that the social space is highly pedestrian-unfriendly in the name of unfettered development and expansion. Suryanayaran writes how:
“Realtors (such as Adarsh) began to seize this opportunity (of housing wealthy IT professionals) for real estate development and neighbourhoods that replicated international ambiences, with high walls and daunting gates that shielded them from the poverty, squalor and deprivation all around, emerged as islands of prosperity in an ocean of multiple cross cutting disadvantages and marginalities. Posh fortified residential enclaves that cordon residents off from all the lower rungs in the hierarchy and establish their social rank in an emphatically conspicuous manner, started coming up. These gated enclaves have been developed by private real estate developers who are selling ‘dreams’ as it were, to the rich” (Suryanarayan 2021: 54).
She writes more generally about the emergence of private developments advertised towards the elites working in the technology-sector in Bengaluru. Here, we present Tech-Park Adjacent Township Housing as the epitome of this approach to urban development. Intended to be a seamless transition between the corporate office and upscale housing, developers such as Adarsh, Divyasree, Godrej and Prestige have benefited from serving the new global elite through such housing typologies. Thus, there exists an explicit, physical relationship between a tech-park and upscale housing communities - hoping to serve as the most convenient link between Bengaluru as a global hub of technology and the ‘highly qualified, globally mobile wealthy professionals predominantly engaged in the information technology (IT) sector.’
Figs. Above and Below - images of life outside the walls of APR-Ecoworld, with tall office buildings looming in the background
Pictures: Abhay Narasimhan