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(Bloomberg) -- Weather officials are predicting further bouts of severe weather in Bangalore as torrential rains pounded the city, submerged access to office parks and hit back-office operations that are the nerve center of the global financial and technology industries.
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Known as India’s Silicon Valley, Bangalore has faced consecutive nights of relentless monsoon rains that have crippled transport and business operations on the city’s key Outer Ring Road (ORR), an area where big name international firms such as Microsoft Corp, Intel Corp, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley have offices. It’s also caused tens of millions in productivity losses locally, according to an industry group.
A cluster of chrome-and-glass towers on the ORR, as well as office parks nearby have become home to about a million software coders and support workers. They handle such vital operations as risk management, customer support and financial compliance. The companies that employ them had returned to a semblance of workplace normalcy after prolonged Covid-19 restrictions, but have been forced to send workers back to working from home yet again.
The chief executive officer of prominent edtech startup UpGrad said he had to reach his office riding on a tractor as his home faced a power cut. “I had to walk 7 km, take a tractor to cross waist deep water and hitch rides from passing bikers to reach office,” said Arjun Mohan, chief executive officer of edtech unicorn UpGrad on LinkedIn. “Quite an adventurous day” he said, adding that he went to work at his office as the city had cut off power and drinking water supply to his neighborhood.
The downpour of the past days, described by local media as some of the wettest on record for Bangalore, highlighted the dilapidated public facilities in one of India’s most global cities and irked the global businesses that have made it their base. The city has already reported two deaths due to the rains and India’s Meteorological Department has issued a yellow alert for Bangalore, indicating further bad weather.
Poor infrastructure in the city’s technology corridor is “bringing down the efficiency and productivity of the companies and putting employees’ safety and wellbeing at risk,” members of the Outer Ring Road Companies’ Association, which includes Wall Street banks and global tech behemoths, complained in a strongly-worded letter to the chief minister of Karnataka state, of which Bangalore is capital. Flooding led to a five-hour traffic jam where workers were stuck leading to a loss of about $30 million, the group said in the letter.