Bengaluru
India's Silicon Valley on the Deccan Plateau
Bengaluru is India's technology capital, a sprawling city of around fourteen million on the Deccan Plateau that has become synonymous with software, startups, and the global IT industry. Once known as a tranquil retirement city of gardens and pleasant weather, it now hums with engineers, multinational research centers, and venture capital, its traffic legendarily snarled by growth that has outpaced its roads. It remains, even so, one of India's greenest and most cosmopolitan big cities.
The city sits high on the southern Deccan Plateau at around nine hundred metres, an elevation that gives it a mild, temperate climate unusual for tropical India and earned it the nickname the Garden City. Lacking a major river, it historically relied on a network of artificial lakes and tanks, many now shrunken or polluted by rapid expansion. The rocky, undulating plateau around it is dotted with granite outcrops and, increasingly, glass-walled technology parks.
The Vijayanagara-era chieftain Kempe Gowda founded a mud-walled fort here in 1537, and the settlement grew under successive rulers before the British developed a cantonment beside the old town in the nineteenth century. Pleasant weather and good institutions later drew aerospace, defense, and electronics enterprises, and from the 1980s a wave of software companies turned Bengaluru into the heart of India's IT boom. Today, as capital of Karnataka, it anchors the country's innovation economy.