Bengaluru | Rebooting India’s Silicon Valley

If the city looms like a giant mathematical riddle, against its skyline are getting silhouetted shapes yearning towards resolution. The force of human will, the persuasive power of ideas, all trying to bring order and coherence to the urban jungle. Picture a man, lean and hungry for action, tilting his lance against immovable objects. Krishna Byre Gowda, minister for Greater Bengaluru development, is a politician by vocation but a technocrat by instinct. At home with arcane points of policy and law, but also a natural out there in the field. He’s as likely to be found making a slide-backed presentation on a TED video as he can be found on the side of a Bengaluru street, pointing to a clogged drain or fussing over the presence of garbage and the absence of municipal workers. He likes to keep things clean: plans, actions and, by common reputation, matters of personal probity. If a road gets white-topped according to an older plan, even if it’s just about to be dug for a new flyover, it would be par for the course in an Indian city. One more contract, some more money going around. But not for Byre Gowda: the other day, he screamed at officials for the sheer waste of public money and got cracking on a single digital platform for monitoring civic works.