Bengaluru's tunnel road and the political fight over who gets the city

At a ceremony on the morning of 29 June 2026 (UTC), Karnataka Chief Minister DK Shivakumar laid the foundation stone for Bengaluru's controversial tunnel road project, a roughly 18-kilometre corridor intended to link the city's northern arterial near Hebbal with the southern end of the central business district near Silk Board. The BJP, both before and immediately after the ceremony, dismissed the project as an "elite corridor" — the kind of framing that, in Indian urban politics, is shorthand for "this is not for the people who actually live here." Two days earlier, on the same beat, Shivakumar had warned publicly that the state was preparing to ban gutka and pan masala over concerns about their role as gateways into harder drugs — a separate policy signal, but one that, read together with the tunnel road, sketches a state government trying to hold the centre on questions of lifestyle, urban form, and public order simultaneously.

The interesting question is not whether the tunnel road will be built — work has begun, the political cover is in place, and the state has its reasons. The interesting question is what kind of city Bengaluru is going to be by the time the ribbon is cut, and who is going to be inside the car.

The case the government is making

The state government's argument is straightforward and largely defensible on its own terms. Bengaluru's traffic problem is one of the most cited congestion failures in any Asian megacity; commute times on the ORR and the Hosur Road axis routinely run over ninety minutes for what should be a fifteen-kilometre hop. A bored-tunnel corridor, the argument runs, takes the conflict between cross-city through-traffic and local movement off the surface grid entirely, frees up arterial capacity for buses and last-mile traffic, and avoids the land-acquisition bloodletting that has stalled every surface-road widening project in the city for the last fifteen years. The Indian Express reported on 29 June that the project has been positioned by Shivakumar's office as a flagship of his tenure — a long-duration piece of public works that will define how the city moves in 2040 rather than how it moves this quarter.

The technocratic case, in other words, is real. Bengaluru does need grade-separated north-south capacity, and a tunnel is one of the few ways to add it without flattening another set of neighbourhoods.

The case against, and why it sticks

The BJP's "elite corridor" line is partisan, but it is not empty. Tunnels are expensive, and the only people who will use a tunnel road are people who can already afford a car and the fuel and the time-of-day premium that justify paying a toll. A roughly 18-kilometre bored tunnel does not move a BMTC bus, does not move a cyclist, and does not move a pedestrian; it moves the subset of Bengaluru that has been using the Hebbal–Silk Board axis as a private-vehicle corridor all along. Read against the city's stalled suburban rail project, its perpetually delayed metro extensions, and its bus-lane ambitions, the tunnel road starts to look like an admission that the surface-transit agenda is no longer the state's primary bet — that the modal future being planned for, in capital-allocation terms, is a private one.

The framing the opposition has chosen — "elite" — is doing a lot of work that more careful language would not. But the underlying objection, that this is a piece of infrastructure designed for the top decile of commuters, is hard to dismiss on the numbers alone. The cost recovery model for any tunnel of this scale is going to depend on toll revenue, and toll revenue is going to come from vehicles. Whoever rides in those vehicles is, definitionally, a minority of the city's population.

What this tells you about how Indian cities are actually being built

Strip the partisan packaging away and the tunnel road debate is a working illustration of a pattern that has repeated across Indian urban politics for at least a decade. The infrastructure projects that move fastest are the ones with a clean elite constituency — the expressway, the airport connector, the tunnel. The infrastructure projects that serve the median commuter — the bus lane, the suburban rail line, the pedestrian overpass that actually connects to a footpath — are the ones that take fifteen years, get half-built, and then get relaunched under a new name. The reasons are familiar: land, litigation, multi-agency coordination, voter visibility. A tunnel road has none of those problems in the same form. You dig under the litigation. You dig under the land. You dig under the voter who cannot see the project from the street and therefore cannot organise against it.

That is not an argument against the tunnel road on its merits. It is an argument for noticing that the political economy of urban infrastructure in this country has produced a category of project that is mostly immune to the friction that slows every other category down. The tunnel road is what a city builds when its political class has stopped believing it can build the other things.

The broader Shivakumar signal

The same chief minister, in the same news week, moved on gutka and pan masala with the explicit framing that these products function as entry points into harder substances for young users — a paternalist, public-health-coded intervention that, unlike the tunnel road, bears almost entirely on the working-class and lower-middle-class consumers of those products, and not on the car-owning constituency that will use the Hebbal–Silk Board tunnel. Read together, the two moves sketch a state government comfortable disciplining the habits of the bottom half of the city while subsidising the mobility of the top half. That is a sharper thing to say than the partisan language on either side has managed, but the underlying pattern is in the data.

Stakes

If the tunnel road is built on the current plan and on the current financing model, Bengaluru will have its grade-separated north-south spine within the decade. The traffic story on the Hebbal–Silk Board axis will improve for the people who use it. The city as a whole will be a place where the modal split has hardened further toward private vehicles, where the political cover for surface-transit investment will be weaker than it was the day the foundation stone was laid, and where the BJP's "elite corridor" line — whatever its motives — will have been vindicated by the ridership numbers. That is a choice. It is being made in plain sight, and it will outlast every politician currently arguing about it.

What remains uncertain

The sources available at the time of writing do not specify the project's final cost figure, the tolling structure, or the contractual counterparties. The state government's framing on gutka and pan masala bans similarly lacks a published draft order in the materials reviewed here. Both will clarify in the weeks ahead, and either could change the political reading materially.

Desk note: The wire treatment of this story on 29 June 2026 framed the tunnel road as a routine foundation-stone event and the gutka move as a standalone health intervention. The editorial decision here was to read the two together as a single signal about which constituencies the Karnataka state government is prioritising in capital-allocation terms — and to name that reading, while leaving the technocratic case for the tunnel road intact on its own terms.