Bengaluru

Overview

Bengaluru, called Bangalore until 1 November 2014, is the capital and largest city of Karnataka. At the 2011 census the city had a population of 8,443,675, the third most populous in India and the largest in South India, while the urban agglomeration held 8,499,399 people. It sits at about 900 metres above sea level on the Mysore plateau, which is why its climate is milder than the rest of southern India, and it is known as the Garden City for the parks that make up the old quarters.^[1]

The city is the centre of India's information technology and startup economy: in 2024 its metropolitan economy was estimated at about 590 billion dollars, it contributes nearly a third of Karnataka's gross state domestic product, and the Globalisation and World Cities Research Network classifies it as an alpha city, the category for cities most integrated into the world economy.^[1]

It is also a government and research city. The headquarters of the Indian Space Research Organisation, the Indian Institute of Science, the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences and a large part of India's aerospace and defence electronics industry are here, which is the older half of the story that ends with software parks in the south east.^[1]

Milestones

1. 4000 BCEArchaeological finds indicate settlement in the region.The city is far older than its fort.
2. 890 CEThe name Bengaluru first appears, on a hero stone at Begur in Old Kannada.
3. 1537Kempe Gowda I builds a mud fort and lays out the town's petes, the foundation of the modern city.^[1]
4. 1565After the fall of Vijayanagara at Talikota, Kempe Gowda declares independence and the town expands.
5. 1638An Adil Shahi army defeats Kempe Gowda III and the city becomes a jagir of Shahaji.
6. 1759Hyder Ali takes control of Mysore and with it the administration of the city, which passes to Tipu Sultan.
7. 1809The British cantonment is laid out beside the old town, and the city begins to exist as two settlements.
8. 1862The Bangalore Municipal Board is established on 27 March and the city is divided into eight wards.
9. 1881The city and the civil and military station are organised as separate municipalities.
10. 1898A plague epidemic kills nearly 3,500 people and forces a rebuild of the city's sanitation.
11. 1949The two municipalities merge into a single corporation of seventy members.
12. 1956The city becomes the capital of Mysore State, renamed Karnataka in 1973.
13. 1985The Bangalore Metropolitan Region Development Authority is set up to plan the wider area.
14. 2007The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike is created by merging the corporation with seven city councils and 111 village panchayats.
15. 2014The state formally renames the city Bengaluru on 1 November, replacing the anglicised Bangalore.^[1]
16. 2025The state notifies five city corporations and a Greater Bengaluru Authority in place of the single civic body.^[1]

Name

The earliest known use of the name is on a ninth century hero stone at Begur, which records a battle in 890 CE and belongs to the Western Ganga dynasty. Kempe Gowda I took the name of a village near Kodigehalli when he founded the town in 1537. Bangalore is the anglicised form, in use through the colonial period and after, until the state government accepted a proposal by the writer U. R. Ananthamurthy to change it: the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike passed a resolution on 27 September 2006 and the change took effect on 1 November 2014 after the union government approved it.^[1]

The folk etymology, that a lost Hoysala king was fed boiled beans by an old woman and named the place benda kaal uru, town of boiled beans, is repeated everywhere and supported nowhere. The more accepted suggestion is that bengaluru derives from benga, the Kannada name for the Indian kino tree, which grew in the region.^[1]

History

The region was ruled by the Western Ganga dynasty from about 350 CE and came under the Cholas in the early eleventh century. In the late middle ages it formed part of the Hoysala kingdom and then of the Vijayanagara Empire, and it was a Vijayanagara governor, Kempe Gowda I, who built the mud fort in 1537 that is treated as the founding of the present city. Inside the fort the town was divided into petes, with Chickpet and Doddapete intersecting at Doddapete Square, and tanks such as Kempambudhi were built for water. Vijayanagara literature called the place Devarayanagara and Kalyanapura, the auspicious city.^[1]

After the empire fell at Talikota in 1565, Kempe Gowda declared independence. In 1638 an Adil Shahi army defeated Kempe Gowda III and the city became a jagir of Shahaji; the Mughals later captured it and sold it to Chikka Devaraja Wodeyar of Mysore. After the death of Krishnaraja Wodeyar II in 1759, Hyder Ali took the kingdom and the city passed to his son Tipu Sultan, whose defeat in the Anglo-Mysore Wars brought the British East India Company and the princely state of Mysore.^[1]

Through the nineteenth century the city was effectively two places: the pete, where the residents were mostly Kannada speaking, and the British cantonment, whose population was mostly Tamil and English. The cantonment grew, roads were widened, the municipal board was created in 1862, Chamarajpet became the first planned residential extension in 1892 and a wholesale market opened at Tharagupet in 1895. A plague epidemic in 1898 killed nearly 3,500 people and produced the sanitation and communication works that followed it.^[1]

Geography and climate

The city covers 741 square kilometres on the Mysore plateau at an average elevation of 900 metres, with its highest point at Doddabettahalli, 962 metres, on a ridge in the west. The metropolitan region covers 7,005 square kilometres across the districts of Bengaluru Urban, Bengaluru Rural and Ramanagara. Soils are red laterite and loamy clays, the south is uneven with granite and gneiss outcrops, and the forest cover, 68.3 per cent in the early 1970s, has fallen sharply as the city has grown.^[1]

The climate is tropical savanna, moderated by the altitude: April is the hottest month with an average high of 34.1 degrees, January the coolest with an average low of 15.1, the monsoon runs from June to September with a second wet spell in October and November, and September is the wettest month. The record high, 39.2 degrees, was set on 24 April 2016 during a strong El Nino, and the record low, 7.8 degrees, was recorded in January 1884.^[1]

Economy

• Information technology and business services, the sector that gave the city its second nickname, with more than two thousand technology companies as early as 2016.
• Aerospace and defence electronics, built around Hindustan Aeronautics, the Defence Research and Development Organisation and ISRO's centres.
• Automobiles, heavy machinery, textiles, biotechnology and electronics, the manufacturing base that still contributes about 36 per cent of the city's output against 39.5 per cent from services.^[1]
• Startups and venture capital, since the 2010s the largest concentration of new technology companies in the country.

The city is among the fastest growing metropolises in India, hosts the country's fourth largest fast moving consumer goods market and the third highest number of high net worth individuals, and its prosperity is unusually uneven: the 2011 census recorded about 597 slums holding roughly sixteen per cent of the population, and studies have measured a Gini coefficient of 0.64 alongside unequal infrastructure between neighbourhoods.^[1]

Administration

Civic government began with the Bangalore Municipal Board in March 1862 and a separate board for the cantonment; both became municipalities in 1881 and merged in 1949 into one corporation with seventy members. In 2007 the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike was created by absorbing seven neighbouring city municipal councils, a town municipal council and 111 village panchayats, which made it one of the largest municipal bodies in India and, by common consent, one of the hardest to run. The Greater Bengaluru Governance Act followed in 2024, and in July 2025 the state notified five city corporations, central, north, south, east and west, with a Greater Bengaluru Authority above them.^[1]

Education and research

The city's literacy rate is 90.33 per cent, second among India's metropolitan centres. Formal schooling began with two native language schools set up by a London mission in 1841, followed in 1842 by the first English school under the Wesleyan mission, a public education department in 1857 and a military school in 1945. That administrative base later became a research one: the Indian Institute of Science, the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, the National Centre for Biological Sciences, the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research and ISRO's satellite centre all sit within the city, which is the reason the technology industry found trained people here rather than the other way round.^[1]