The City Karnataka Keeps Promising Instead of Fixing the One It Has

In Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, the explorer Marco Polo spends the whole book describing dazzling, impossible cities to the emperor Kublai Khan, cities of mirrors, cities suspended over ravines, cities built entirely on stilts above a lake. It takes the Khan most of the book to notice what should have been obvious from the first chapter. Every city Polo describes is the same city. "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice," Polo finally admits. He has never left home. He has just gotten very good at redescribing it.

I thought about that this month, reading that Chief Minister D K Shivakumar had instructed his Commerce and Industries Department to identify five cities, other than Bengaluru, for industrial development. Offer incentives, he said. Pick places with airports. The goal was to ease Bengaluru's population pressure and traffic by pushing jobs and manufacturing elsewhere. The pressure is real enough on paper: Bengaluru has grown from about 1.5 million people in 1970 to an estimated 15.6 million in 2026, adding roughly 6.1 lakh people in the last year alone, a 4.1 percent annual rate. Its vehicle count has crossed 80 lakh, second in the country only to Delhi, growing by five to six lakh vehicles a year. Every outlet ran the announcement as news.

It isn't quite news. In November 2020, at the Bengaluru Tech Summit, a different Deputy Chief Minister announced an almost identically named scheme, Beyond Bengaluru, naming almost the same five cities, Mysuru, Mangaluru, Hubballi-Dharwad, Shivamogga, Belagavi, Kalaburagi, for almost the same reason. A task force was formed then, too. A white paper was promised then too. If you live in one of these six cities, your government has now formally promised you prosperity at least twice on a six-year loop. The interesting question isn't whether the idea is good. Decentralising Bengaluru's pressure is, on the merits, a genuinely good idea. The interesting question is what actually has to happen for the third telling to look different from the first. Start with what round one revealed, because it's more useful as diagnosis than as indictment. Deccan Herald went back to ask people running businesses in these cities how it had actually gone, and the answers point to specific, fixable machinery rather than bad intent. A pharmaceutical founder in Dharwad said it took him eighteen months to clear approvals, and described paying informal fees at nearly every step as an ordinary cost of doing business. That is a single-window clearance problem. Bengaluru has spent two decades building a relatively mature approvals pipeline for industry; these six cities have not. Naming them again does nothing if the paperwork still takes a year and a half to clear.

A Belagavi entrepreneur pointed to a second gap: in the same window that Beyond Bengaluru was meant to be lifting these cities, the state instead allocated five hundred crore rupees to strengthen Bengaluru's own ecosystem. The numbers from round one back him up. The original 2020 scheme proposed a dedicated one thousand crore rupee Beyond Bengaluru Growth Fund. But when the state's own ELEVATE startup programme later disbursed sixty crore rupees to 263 startups, only 35 percent of that money went to startups actually based outside Bengaluru, in a scheme built entirely on the premise of shifting weight away from it. That isn't proof the government never meant it. It's proof there was no binding mechanism forcing money to follow the announcement once it was made. This time round, the state has already earmarked four thousand two hundred and ninety-one crore rupees for 2026-27 to spread tech-led employment beyond Bengaluru, on top of twenty thousand crore rupees in investment commitments Shivakumar has cited. Whether that money actually lands outside Bengaluru, in the same proportion it's announced in, is exactly the kind of thing that can be tracked in public rather than taken on faith. A ring-fenced fund for these five cities, with disbursement made public the way election spending is, would be a genuine test of intent this time, and a very checkable one.

The third gap is the one worth sitting with longest, because it cuts against the whole premise. Shivayogi Turmari, who runs a technology innovation centre at KLE in the region, said Beyond Bengaluru is being designed by people who live in Bengaluru and understand very little about what the rest of Karnataka actually needs. The historian Ramachandra Guha made a version of this argument back in 2019, telling a Bengaluru Central University panel that Karnataka needed more than one real centre of commerce, the way Tamil Nadu and Kerala already had, rather than one swollen capital deciding everything for everywhere else. You cannot build that kind of second centre by incentive cheque alone. It requires giving these cities actual authority over their own industrial planning, not just funding decided in Bengaluru and administered from Bengaluru.

Which is where Bengaluru's own governance becomes relevant, not as a separate complaint but as the same problem in miniature. The city has had no elected civic body since September 2020, the same month the first Beyond Bengaluru cycle launched. Its municipal corporation was dissolved last year and split into five new corporations, currently run by appointed officials. Kathyayini Chamaraj of Civic Bangalore called that dissolution a setback for local self-governance, warning that power was moving upward into a new state authority rather than closer to residents. If Karnataka wants Mysuru or Belagavi to eventually plan their own industrial growth, it would help to first show, in its own capital, what handing real planning power back to a city actually looks like. Right now the direction of travel in Bengaluru is the opposite of what Beyond Bengaluru asks other cities to trust will happen for them.

None of this is a reason to write the scheme off. Mysuru's electronics sector is real, global investors are actually there, and Tumakuru's housing market is genuinely responding to a Metro extension in planning. Round one's actual, named wins are countable: IBM and Glowtouch opened delivery centres in Mysuru employing 250 and 300 people respectively, TCS opened an ITES branch in Dakshina Kannada with over 4,000 employees, and i-Merit set up in Hubballi with 300 local hires. Those are real jobs. They are also, against a city adding six lakh people a year, a rounding error. The idea has already worked in patches. What separates a patch from a pattern is whether these three gaps close: approvals that take weeks instead of eighteen months, funding that is tracked publicly instead of quietly redirected, and planning authority that actually moves outward instead of staying in Bengaluru with a new mailing address on the press release.

Those are three things a journalist, or frankly anyone in Belagavi or Dharwad, can go and check. Has the approval timeline actually changed? Has the ring-fenced money, if it exists, actually been spent where it was promised? Has any of the five cities been given real say over its own industrial plan, or just a grant? Beyond Bengaluru has been announced enough times now that the announcement itself has stopped being the interesting part. What's left to find out is whether this round is finally building a different city, or just describing Bengaluru one more time and calling it something else.