A few feet too many

Bangalore’s soon-to-be biggest landmark for luxury retail, UB City, is in the limelight for the wrong reasons. The project, with a total built-up area of 1.5 million square feet, has been found to have encroached on the Vittal Mallya Road in Bangalore’s central business district (CBD). Karnataka’s anticorruption agency, Lokayukta, which discovered the deviation by project developers, has issued a notice to Brihat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), asking it to restore the width of the road.

The project, developed jointly by Vijay Mallya’s UB Holdings and Prestige Group, is a cynosure of all eyes, and is also the city’s latest tourist attraction. Bangalore’s CBD has no other project that matches UB City in size or grandeur; the green cover from the close-by Cubbon Park adds glitter to the four imposing towers of UB City. As things looked hunky-dory, a group of residents from Vittal Mallya Road complained to Lokayukta alleging that the road had shrunk due to encroachment. Soon, inspections of the road followed at the direction of Justice N. Santhosh Hegde, a former Supreme Court Judge who heads the organisation.

Senior Lokayukta officials say they found the encroachment to be highest and close to 3.5 feet at the entrance to UB City. The Lokayukta relied on government survey records for its conclusion. The BBMP, on the other hand, approved the modified plans of the project, which again were backed by some records from the developers.

While BT’s e-mail queries to UB Group on the issue did not elicit any response, Prestige Group denied there has been any wrong doing in the project development. Prestige’s Vice President (Public Relations) Noor Nayeem says: “As far as our knowledge goes, we have not encroached on any government or BBMP land. Since we had already obtained the drawings from the survey authorities, which clearly shows the road width as surveyed in 1975-76, we went by the same."

The UB City houses some blue chip companies such as Citigroup, 3M, ABN Amro, Ernst & Young, Yahoo, Toyota, and Tata Motors, and is in talks to get top global brands and retailers to set up shop in its premises.

— K. R. Balasubramanyam