3 Bengaluru: The Migrant City
Bengaluru, often referred to as the city of aspirations, drew energy from India’s liberalization policies in the mid-1980s, positioning itself as a hub for IT firms from the global North seeking low operational costs and access to a growing pool of skilled, affordable labour. This led to the rapid growth of IT, software industries, and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sectors, and Bengaluru soon earned the label of India’s Start-up Capital (Heitzman, 1999; Parthasarathy, 2004; Patni, 1999; Saxenian, 2002).
With the IT boom, skilled human capital from both within India and abroad flocked to Bengaluru. The city actively encouraged the influx of migrant tech workers, drawn by opportunities to work for global giants like Infosys, Wipro, Google, and Microsoft. Bengaluru’s welcoming atmosphere, combined with promises of long-term career growth and access to robust healthcare and education systems, made it an attractive destination for tech professionals seeking career advancement and stability. However, alongside their expertise and the flow of capital and technology, the contributions of lower-class migrant workers— from rag pickers, construction workers and sanitation workers to domestic workers—were equally vital in facilitating the city’s expansion both vertically and horizontally. This rapid transformation led to significant changes in the “human-nature-space” of the city (Vakulabharanam & Motiram, 2024), prompting the expansion of urban boundaries and the conversion of areas once considered part of the mofussil or deemed “uninhabitable”—such as water bodies and forests—into urban spaces (see Table 1, Appendix).
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