Karnataka issued India's first state information-technology policy in 1997, offering stamp-duty exemption, subsidised and dedicated power, relaxed building and labour rules and priority land allotment to software firms. It built on KEONICS' Electronics City south of Bengaluru, begun in 1978, on the Software Technology Parks regime, and on the International Tech Park at Whitefield developed with Singaporean partners in the 1990s. The result was a city structured by two private campus corridors - Whitefield in the east and Electronic City on the Hosur road - served by ring roads, gated apartment complexes and company buses rather than by a public plan. Other states copied the formula, most visibly Andhra Pradesh with HITEC City in Hyderabad and Tamil Nadu with the Chennai IT corridor.
The policy invented the Indian model of planning by economic enclave: campuses and IT corridors negotiated outside the master plan, generating vast employment and equally vast deficits in water, sewerage and transport. Bengaluru's traffic, lake and flooding crises, and its later metro and transit-oriented development plans, are all responses to an urban form this policy set in motion.
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