In 1978, R. K. Baliga of Keonics acquired 330 acres of scrubland eighteen kilometres south of the city with an idea most people found eccentric: an industrial park only for electronics. He called the vision “the Silicon Valley of India” a decade before the phrase became a cliché.
The public-sector foundation. The bet wasn’t made from nothing. Bangalore already held HAL’s aircraft factories, ITI’s telephone exchanges, BEL’s radios, ISRO’s satellite campus — decades of public-sector engineering that had quietly assembled India’s densest pool of technical talent.
The tenants arrive. Infosys moved its headquarters to Electronic City in the 1980s wilderness years; Wipro turned from cooking oil to code. In 1985 Texas Instruments opened its Bangalore design centre — the first multinational R&D operation in India — and pointed a satellite dish at the sky to move chip designs across the ocean.
The body shop inverts. Through the 1990s, liberalisation and Y2K turned Indian software from contract labour abroad into exports from home. Software technology parks gave the industry dedicated satellite links; campuses rose where the scrub had been.
The grid, printed. The pete grid moved goods on foot; this one moved logic at clock speed. By 2000 the city’s name had become a verb in western newsrooms, and the next era would not need an industrial park at all — it would start in apartments and cafés closer to town.
