Bengaluru technology did not arrive with the internet. It grew out of a patch of land off Hosur Road that the state government bought in 1978, and it grew through the choices of a small group of officials, engineers and chief ministers over the next five decades. Deccan Herald marked that story on 8 November, as part of its Karunadotsava coverage, with a piece on the city that built India’s technology engine. Karunadotsava, observed on 1 November, marks the formation of Karnataka, and the newspaper used the occasion to look back at how its capital became the centre of the country’s software trade.
The starting point for Bengaluru technology was Electronics City. The Karnataka State Electronics Development Corporation, known as Keonics, was set up in 1976, and its first chairman and managing director, R K Baliga, bought 330 acres in Anekal taluk, about 18 km from the city limits. The land, in the villages of Konappana Agrahara and Doddathogur, was meant for electronics factories. Through the 1980s a small number of electronics firms set up there. After liberalisation in the 1990s, the estate changed character, and companies such as Infosys, Wipro, HP, Motorola, Siemens and Tata opened campuses, followed later by Intel, TCS and Genpact. Keonics also set up the country’s first Software Technology Park of India in the city.
Bengaluru technology began in Electronics City
The estate gave the city something it had lacked: a place where technology firms could cluster. Baliga, who had studied at the Indian Institute of Science and worked for General Electric and Westinghouse, had argued that Bangalore could become India’s silicon valley, and the land purchase was the first step. The early firms were mostly in electronics, and the shift to software that built Bengaluru technology came with the 1990s, when Indian firms began selling programming and support work to clients abroad. The estate’s name stuck, and Electronics City remains the address most associated with the city’s first technology boom. Baliga died in October 1988, before the software trade he had planned for arrived in full, but the estate he bought is still the foundation of the industry.
Bengaluru technology and the Krishna years
The second push came from government. S M Krishna, chief minister of Karnataka from 1999 to 2004, made Bengaluru technology a priority of his administration. He set up the Bangalore Agenda Task Force and put Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani in charge of it. His government allowed 24-hour operations and night shifts for women in the industry, and it worked on roads and flyovers to ease the traffic that came with growth. During his five years in office, Amazon, IBM and Intel opened offices in the city, while Infosys and Wipro kept growing. Krishna, who died in December 2024 at 92, is still described as the architect of brand Bengaluru, and his five years in office are credited with putting the city on the world map as an IT hub.
The city itself changed around Bengaluru technology. Bangalore was officially renamed Bengaluru in 2014, and the technology firms spread from Electronics City to Whitefield and the Outer Ring Road, where the offices of Google and Microsoft now sit alongside Indian firms. The Indian Institute of Science and the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore supply graduates, and the city counted more than 25,000 startups in 2025, including unicorns such as Swiggy, Ola, Razorpay and Meesho. The firms behind Bengaluru technology handle work for clients in the United States and Europe, and the city is now home to research centres for many global companies. Walk through the Outer Ring Road or Whitefield and the offices of Infosys, TCS, IBM, Accenture, Google and Microsoft stand within a short distance of each other.
What Bengaluru technology looks like now
The numbers show the scale of Bengaluru technology. Bengaluru’s companies account for more than one-third of India’s total IT exports, and the city is the country’s largest IT hub and exporter. One estimate put the metropolitan economy at $359.9 billion in 2023, which placed it among India’s most productive urban regions. Those figures come from outside estimates rather than official releases, and they move from year to year, but the direction of Bengaluru technology is steady: the city keeps adding firms, graduates and offices. The Deccan Herald piece, published a week after Karunadotsava, treats that growth as the product of decisions made in the 1970s and 1990s rather than as a sudden arrival, and it names the people who made them: Baliga, who bought the land, and Krishna, who cleared the way for the firms that followed.