affordable housing

Regulatory Reforms For Enabling Small Businesses or Startups (Since January, 2016)

Each NAIN institution will be assisted as follows:

Apart from ideas, talent, investments and emerging unicorns, Bangalore is rife with accelerators and incubators to aid entrepreneurs in their startup’s infancy stages. Initiatives like Microsoft Accelerator, 10,000 startups by Nasscomm, TLabs, Walmart Labs and partnerships with corporates like Yes Bank, Tata Group and Mahindra & Mahindra have ensured that Bengaluru’s ecosystem remains conducive to business development.  Additionally, startups don’t have to worry about unnecessary costs due to a plethora of co-working spaces available. Along with global co-working space provider WeWork, the lanes of Bangalore are buzzing with spaces like BHIVE and Jaagarnaut to name a few. “There are more than five already under construction on just one street,” says Tiwary. 

Consequently, VC investment in fintech startups soared. Just in 2018, fintech startups raised $2.34bn across 145 deals according to Indian startup resource Your Story. With 438 fintech startups in the city already, the number is only set to surge. “Bangalore is a melting pot for tech entrepreneurs and the rise in fintech will change the way people use money – more so in the next decade,” Pasari says. “The tech sector in general has a vibrant startup brigade that’s not afraid of taking risks and trying ideas that have a huge impact. This makes Bangalore the perfect hotbed for VCs.” Clearly VCs are getting increasingly attracted to inject money in Bangalore given the slew of unicorns already present. “Flipkart and Ola are phenomenal success stories not just for themselves but for the whole Bangalore ecosystem,” Legg says. He argues the success of these unicorns raises confidence and means the employment and training of thousands of people who often end up working at startups sooner or later. Along with providing mentorship, former workers or heads of bigger players pump their money into newer startups. “The co-founder of Flipkart is now investing into more Indian companies,” Legg adds. “Obviously it’s better to have a former founder as an investor than someone who hasn’t run anything.”  As a result, Bangalore also attracted foreign investors. For instance, Japanese multinational holding conglomerate SoftBank has already invested $8bn in the past three years and is ambitious to invest $100bn through its Vision Fund into Indian tech startups with a focus on Bangalore. Adding to that, Indian startups attracted more than $33.4bn of funding through foreign direct investment.  Moreover, the city saw the most funding in the AI and machine learning sectors. Tech startups bagged an incredible funding worth $328m in 2018 compared to $26m in 2017. And, given that Bengaluru was named as one of the world’s best rising tech hubs for startups, according to SmallBusinessPrices, investors have every reason for doing so. And fittingly, Bangalore earned the sobriquet of being the Silicon Valley of India after a considerable number of startups in the tech sector were born there. “Bangalore is getting a bit like Silicon Valley in an Indian context which means there are more engineers, more talent, more startups and more investment coming in,” Legg says.

Even though the primary purpose of the lake changed from being an irrigation tank, its location within the topography and regional drainage system of Bangalore remained. Many parts of Bangalore, particularly KM Pura faced severe floods in the early parts of the last decade. Today, a couple of hours of rain can arrest normal life in Bangalore.

The role of planning in the transformation of Rajapalaya Tank exemplifies how planning practice operates when embedded in such a governance culture.

One Lake, Many Wants

Tradi-tionally, certain groups from the community had the role of man-aging and maintaining the lakes at any particular locality, with accompanying rights, privileges and duties.6 After the formation of Karnataka state, progressively, a number of government organisations got implicated in the management of lakes,

The transformation of human settlements over time can affect the relationship between communities and commons when, for example, social geographies change from rural to urban, or from traditional systems of management to modern bureaucratic systems.

TABLE 1:TIMELINE FOR STATE ACTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE IN KARNATAKA

Departmental communication was a one-sided process, with nodal institutions seeking sectoral information without looking to build climate capacity in the state or involving departments in the ideation process. As a result some recommendations do not seem grounded in what is politically or developmentally tenable.

A related concern is the sharp disappearance of lakes and water bodies, owing to encroachment, pollution and infrastructural activity in the state.

While senior state bureaucrats have been supportive of developing a plan, there is little evidence that they have championed adapting to or mitigating climate change as a cause, at either the political or bureaucratic levels.1