Opinion | Bengaluru stampede exposes a city’s fragile urban dream

 In Bengaluru, we live in a constant duality: always arriving, always late. At dawn, Bengaluru exhales its smoky breath and flings open its arterial roads to a ritual of urgency. Cars jostle with scooters, horns bark their impatience, and office-goers lurch forward in a choreography of haste – a million private urgencies merging into a collective frenzy.
At traffic signals, time is not kept but negotiated – amber means accelerate, and red can merely be a suggestion. Each morning, the city hurtles ahead as if the day were its last.
But in its breathless rush, Bengaluru often forgets to look back – or within. It forgets that infrastructure is not merely concrete and tar, but the quiet covenant between a city and its people. And when that covenant breaks, the consequences are not metaphors but funerals.
This week, the city broke again – not in silence, but in the loud crush of bodies outside its beloved cricket stadium. A celebration turned fatal; a crowd turned into a stampede. Eleven lives lost, dozens injured, and a city left asking, once again: who is responsible when joy turns to grief? When growth outpaces governance? When cities forget the very people they are meant to serve?

Tragedy strikes
This week, that fragility became tragically real. During a public celebration for the city’s beloved cricket team, Royal Challengers Bangalore, chaos turned deadly. Fans swarmed the streets to revel in RCB’s first-ever IPL championship, only for disaster to strike. An unexpected crowd of people packed around Chinnaswamy Stadium, in numbers far beyond what authorities expected. Officials had announced an open-top victory parade but cancelled it at the last minute, creating confusion and restlessness. By 4 pm, as the team arrived, thousands pressed at the stadium gates. When one gate was partially opened, the crowd surged and collapsed inward. In the ensuing stampede, 11 people – including youngsters – were crushed to death and 47 injured.
Eyewitnesses described utter mayhem and a lack of any control. What should have been a moment of pure joy turned into a tableau of grief – a stark reminder that in Bengaluru, even celebration comes with a deadly caveat.

A City Even God Struggles to Save
Bengaluru’s creaking infrastructure and frenetic growth have been common knowledge for years.
But now even its leaders openly admit the crisis. Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar, tasked with the city’s development, had bluntly confessed earlier that “even if God were to descend and walk on Bengaluru’s roads, nothing can be done within the next one, two or three years.”

Some figures
This resignation is striking, given that the city’s civic budget nearly doubled to ₹19,930 crore this year, with 65 per cent (approx) ostensibly devoted to infrastructure. An audit of BBMP in 2022-23 revealed the misuse of ₹2,291 crore. So, the money circulates among a select class. The man on the road trudges along, just like the stray dogs and donkeys right under the Silk Board flyover.
On the streets, the reality remains bleak. Bengaluru’s roads carry over 11 million vehicles for a population of around 14 million. The mass-transit alternatives meant to ease this strain are woefully behind schedule. Namma Metro’s Phase II, almost a decade in the making, is still incomplete. More than 40 km of new lines remain unfinished. Every missed deadline on a flyover or train line has a human cost and can be measured in thousands of hours lost in traffic and, as this week showed, in lives as well.
Political and administrative apathy has compounded these woes. Grandiose ideas like tunnel highways and double-decker flyovers are floated even as basic fixes languish – the Peripheral Ring Road proposed in 2007 remains stuck on paper, storm drains stay clogged until floods hit, and many projects, large and small, get mired in red tape.
Meanwhile, the city has barely 4,600 traffic police personnel for nearly 80 lakh vehicles. This leaves many intersections effectively lawless. When torrential rains submerge parts of Bengaluru every year, it is a telling snapshot of civic failure. However, this has become distressingly routine.

‘Good Life’ in an Urgent City
In the aftermath of the stampede, an uneasy question looms: What is the point of Bengaluru’s breakneck growth if it cannot guarantee a decent life to its citizens? The philosopher Aristotle noted that people come together in cities to live, and remain together to live the good life (which he termed Eudaimonia). This is an ideal glaringly missing in Bengaluru today. This metropolis proudly hails its tech parks and unicorn start-ups, yet forgets the basic tenets of a livable city: safe roads, reliable transit, and a sense of community well-being. Instead, its people navigate daily hazards, never sure if the infrastructure around them will support or betray their aspirations.
This tragedy must serve as a civic reckoning. The lives lost in the stampede should not be reduced to another statistic in the news cycle. It should force a collective pause. Bengaluru, a city of extraordinary talent and ambition, needs an equally extraordinary vision for its urban future. That means political will instead of lip service, long-term planning instead of ad-hoc patchwork, and accountability for every pothole unfixed, every metro delayed, every warning ignored. The city must be reimagined not merely as India’s Silicon Valley, but as a place that values quality of life as much as economic success.
The stadium tragedy is a heartbreaking marker of how far Bengaluru has strayed from the ideal of the ‘good city.’ But it can also be a turning point. In a city defined by constant hurry, there is now an urgent moral imperative to slow down and rethink what progress should mean. With humane urban design, efficient public services, and a revival of genuine civic responsibility, the city can transform its narrative from one of fragility and chaos into one of resilience and hope. The question is whether we – citizens and leaders alike – have the will to demand and build a Bengaluru where no morning commute, and no celebration, ever again ends in tragedy.