Midweek Musings 4 31.12.2025 Scorching the Earth that is what GBA is likely to do to Bangalore.

 

By Malini Shankar 

Digital Discourse Foundation 

Scorching the Earth that is what GBA is likely to do to Bangalore.

Greater Bangalore Authority (GBA) is a newly notified Administrative organization / administrative cell set up with a mandate to administer urban subdivisions to be carved from several rural parts of what is now Bangalore rural district and will further carve out many areas of neighbouring districts. GBA will sprawl over 712² square kilometres with a local population of over 1.3 crores. This will provide opportunity for development of satellite towns, but will ruin Bangalore City as we know it today. The Garden City will morph into a large hideous hydra headed unaesthetic Central Business District.

Malls, Multi storeyed buildings devoid of FSR conformation will make the city’s skyline an asymmetric concrete jungle with botched and mismatched land use planning. FSR? These structures will not have cross ventilation or wide windows. These structures will completely block natural light and fresh air; and one 5 star toilet will serve the needs of some 300 – 800 people per day. For example the craze for real estate development will push Bangalore residents to surrender to the real estate lobby at throw away prices. Real estate sharks and land grabbers will try to optimize land value by ‘developing’ concrete jungles at the expense of green cover. The unplanned concrete cover is a recipe for urban floods. “Landscape” will leave the avian denizens and arboreal mammals like monkeys and squirrels homeless. Land Sharks and captains of industry from Electronics City and India’s Silicon Valley will impress upon Media and Public Representatives the need to notify Bangalore as a Union Territory.

Further after decimating the green cover and developing concrete jungles the developers and the owners of the apportioned space of the concrete jungle will install Air conditioners in all the small spaced rooms with the emissions flooding the neighbouring structure’s human residents. The cumulative impact of homeless urban wildlife is that they are most likely to be declared as ‘pests’ and so hunters and poachers will have a field day killing these legalized vermin. After that, the prey species of such wildlife will start festering the extra space they get by the loss of habitat for the hunters. This will start bothering the residents so much that the Hip and happening, kitti-party circuit of women in these concrete jungles will blame the new age vermin on Climate Change! Ofcourse other women in the hip and happening kitty party circuit will gawk at the well informed woman who mouthed this pearl of a wisdom!

The consumption patterns of fresh water usage in such uncalibrated urban development is a compromise we are forcing on future generations. Utterly unsustainable! And utterly unacceptable. So in a way if GBA can plan for residential layouts, Common Property Resources and its sustainability, we should be able to calibrate per capita consumption of resources like water, space, oxygen, and urban / public transport, health services, other logistics, educational facilities, Green Cover and urban development, all on a per capita basis. That is the vital role of planning, corruption notwithstanding. For without planning there will be an oligarchic slant to development, to the detriment of future generations.

It should be possible to calibrate and estimate the amount of wet waste / biodegradable waste that can be generated by an X amount of population to create soil. Soil organic carbon or SOC can moisten the soil, sequestering the Carbon emissions from peat and helps not only in mitigating global warming and Climate Change but will help Smart City Governors calculate Carbon footprint. This is so critical today.

Similarly guidelines for Climate Change adapted architecture can help reduce emissions. … Tenets that ought to be incorporated as HDI or Human Development Index parametres for Smart City Governance. Traditional Indian architecture like sloping tiled roof facilitates rain water harvesting. Open courtyard in the centre of the house helps hot / warm air escape to the sky through the open courtyard and cold air will sweep in through ventilation windows or gaps in the walls. Gaps in the wall refer to holes in laterite stone… which facilitates movement of air from outside to the inside – making it naturally air conditioned! Secondly Laterite is so strong that cement is not necessary at all, reducing Carbon emissions through cement. Besides each laterite stone weighs about 30 kilos making it so strong that one can eliminate the very idea of iron pillars; Laterite is so Climate friendly: being volcanic stone it has generous amounts of iron or Ferrous in it clearly substituting iron pillars. Laterite constructions can support upto four stories without iron pillars. Reducing iron consumption means reducing iron ore mining which will protect our biodiverse areas that much.

In a nutshell spaces should be made for Common Property Resources like public transport, public health infrastructure (including public health and mental health care, separate ambulance drive ways, hospitals etc) Ring Roads for logistics, Solid Waste Management, School / University  and Education districts, Cultural spaces, water bodies recreational spaces, and so on …

If the recent Ethiopian volcanic eruption of Hayli Gubbi on 23.11.24 could cool peninsular India noticeably in less than a fortnight thanks to the Sulphur deposits / Sulphur aerosols it brought to Central Indian landscape of the Vindhyas, then the window period for warming heat Island that Bengaluru will become will likely be just as short.  

If the volcanic explosion of Hayli Gubbi in 2025 or Lake Toba eruption 74,000 years ago did not scorch the Earth in Peninsular India the decimation of urban green cover in Bangalore most certainly will.

In the next week’s column we will try make sense of urban planning for Smart City Governance.