Bengaluru Rural

Timeline

1. 1986Bangalore district is divided into Bangalore Rural and Bangalore Urban, creating the district.The rural district kept the four northern taluks.
2. 2007Kanakapura, Ramanagara, Magadi and Channapatna are separated to form Ramanagara district, halving the rural district's southern reach.
3. 2008Kempegowda International Airport opens at Devanahalli, inside the district, and changes its economy.
4. 2011The census records a population of 990,923, with 21.65 per cent living in urban areas.
5. 2014The state renames Bangalore as Bengaluru, and the district's name follows.
6. 2020sA business park is planned at Devanahalli near the airport, announced at about ₹95 billion, along with industrial and logistics development along the highway corridors.
7. ProposedThe state has considered renaming the district to Kempe Gowda, after the founder of Bengaluru.

The four taluks

• Devanahalli, in the north east, holds the international airport that carries the city's name and the older fort town beside it.
• Doddaballapura, the district headquarters, is the administrative centre and the largest of the towns.
• Hoskote, on the eastern side, is farming country with tanks and lakes that the city's growth keeps reaching for.
• Nelamangala, in the north west, sits on the road towards Tumakuru and the coast, and takes the traffic that the city pushes outward.^[1]

People and land

At the 2011 census the district had 990,923 residents at a density of 441 people per square kilometre, a population growth rate of 16.02 per cent over the decade, a sex ratio of 945 women per thousand men and a literacy rate of 78.29 per cent. Scheduled Castes made up 21.57 per cent of the population and Scheduled Tribes 5.34 per cent. Kannada was the first language of 71.67 per cent, Telugu of 12.84 per cent, Urdu of 9.22 per cent, Tamil of 3.29 per cent and Hindi of 0.96 per cent, and it remains one of the least populous districts in the state.^[1]

The economy is agricultural at its base: ragi, rice, groundnut, sugarcane, castor, grapes and mulberry are the main crops, and mulberry and silkworm rearing support a silk industry that has been part of the district's work for generations, along with weaving. Non metallic minerals feed brick, tile and stoneware manufacture, and a number of wineries operate in the area.^[1]

Silk, silk and sugar

Agriculture in the district is not rice first. Ragi, the millet that is the staple of the old Mysore countryside, leads, followed by rice, groundnut, sugarcane, castor and grapes, with mulberry grown specifically to feed silkworms. The rearing of silkworms and the reeling and weaving that follow it have been a household occupation across these taluks for generations, and silk is the reason the district's small towns have weaving streets and markets rather than only farm mandis. Wineries, a smaller but visible industry, have grown with the grape crop.^[1]

Brick, tile and stoneware manufacture uses the district's non metallic minerals, and dairy and horticulture round out an economy that the census still describes as essentially agricultural even as land along the highways turns into warehouses and industrial estates.^[1]

The city's shadow

The district's future is being decided by infrastructure that was planned for the city. The airport at Devanahalli turned a farming taluk into a development corridor; the business park planned beside it, the industrial estates around Nelamangala and Doddaballapura and the logistics demand created by online retail all point the same way, from agriculture towards land, warehousing and services. The same pressure makes the district a useful test of how the region's growth is shared: the urban share of its population, a fifth in 2011, is the number to watch.^[1]

Heritage and the airport corridor

Devanahalli is the district's historical anchor as well as its growth engine. The fort there is where Tipu Sultan was born in 1751, and the old town's walls and gateways survive beside the modern airport that took the same name from the taluk before it was renamed for Kempegowda. The combination is unusually blunt: a eighteenth century fort, an international airport and a planned business park with a headline cost of about ₹95 billion, inside one taluk.^[1]

Hoskote's tanks and the district's lakes are the other landscape the area is known for, and they are also the resource under the most pressure from construction, which makes water and land the two subjects any future plan for the district has to answer.^[1]

Administration and services

The district is administered by a deputy commissioner at Doddaballapura, with a zilla panchayat for the rural development functions and taluk offices at Devanahalli, Nelamangala, Doddaballapura and Hoskote. Twenty hoblies and 294 villages sit under those four taluks, and three town municipal or city municipal councils handle the urban wards, which is a light structure for an area being reshaped by the city next door.^[1]

The services that matter most to residents are the ones the city pulls on: buses and suburban trains towards Bengaluru, the state highway network that carries commuters, and schools and primary health centres distributed across the taluks. The census literacy rate of 78.29 per cent, well below the city's 90.33, is the clearest measure of the gap the district has to close.^[1][2]