What with the rhetoric about land grabbing, excess land being acquired, doing justice to farmers, and politicians cashing in — the Bangalore Mysore Infrastructure Corridor Project has become a subject of power struggle between the Deve Gowda family and the company (Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprise) implementing the project, which is headed by a US-based Indian engineer. The old-style politician that he is, H.D. Deve Gowda would like to show the upstart private enterprise, trying to get a foothold in his territory, that he is still the boss, irrespective of court verdicts, business agreements and a pioneering infrastructure plan hanging fire. Politicians and bureaucrats have lined up behind both groups, depending on convenience and profits.

Plans for a rapid access way between Bangalore and Mysore began in 1988 when the Government of Karnataka in an attempt to stagger the growth of Bangalore proposed expansion into the Bangalore-Mysore region by building an expressway with private participation.

In 1995 when Deve Gowda himself was chief minister the state government offered the Bangalore Mysore Expressway project on a 30-year build-own- operate-transfer (BOOT) platter — with real estate and toll fares identified as revenue streams for the private developer. He signed an MoU with a consortium comprising M/s Vanasse Hangen Brustlin Incorporated and SAB Engineering and Construction Incorporated from the US, and M/s Kalyani Group Limited from India. The consortium assigned implementation to NICE, a company created by it.

In 1997 when Deve Gowda fortuitously became the prime minister his successor CM, the late J.H. Patel, signed a framework agreement with NICE to provide 20,193 acres of land (13,327 acres private land, 6,956 acres government land) to create a 111 km expressway and five townships between Bangalore and Mysore, over a period of 10 years. The world-class, access-controlled, toll expressway was to reduce travel time between the two new economy cities from over three hours to a mere 75 minutes. With the self-sustaining townships thrown in and nearly 700 sq km area around the project developed, a new economic region, the size of Singapore, is projected to emerge. Bangalore-Mysore could be a Tokyo- Yokogawa. The economic potential of the project has drawn investment for the first phase from the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group.

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