HAL Droneport (12°57'16.49"N, 77°40'48.16"E)

 

The Bengaluru droneport is, according to every single person I’ve spoken about it to, the only public service in the city’s urban sprawl that works as intended, which is to say – excellently. People’s eyes light up with pride every time I even mention it in passing; much like my own would in my youth when I heard my dad’s friends and visitors talk about the city’s old bars and gardens and lakes and impossibly green avenues. Even though that stuff is long gone now, I can still relate to the smiles that cross everyone’s faces as I walk through this huge facility. With time, I develop one of my own and start beaming too.

This place is absolutely incredible!

Until relatively recently, the concept of public drones was perhaps more alien to Bengaluru than actual aliens. This was for good and obvious reasons – the huge tracts of army-controlled land spread around the city for more than two centuries have always made the idea of open public airspace an impossibility. In fact, the droneport sits on one of these sites – the HAL airport, earlier used by the Indian Air Force and ‘diplomats’, and named not for the omnipresent artificial intelligence (that’s a classic Bengaluru pun these days) in the city but for a company called Hindustan Aeronautics Limited. In the 2040s, the site was vacated for two reasons:

(a) The air force and army moved all their important operations to spacious locations on the outskirts of town, and

(b) The ‘diplomats’, on account of completing their mission of sucking Bengaluru dry, had no reason to fly into town anymore.

A tired populace waited without bated breath to see what civic bodies would do with the land. They waited for a year, then three, then a decade as one dumb proposal after another came and went. Underground data center with a big park on top of it. Domestic short-haul rocket launch center for the ’common man’ (which eventually went to Majestic.) India’s tallest flag. India’s tallest Karnataka flag. India’s tallest mall. India’s largest mall. Luxury apartment complexes bought up by speculative investment group and held as assets (this was proposed four separate times.) It was hopeless as usual.

Then one morning, everyone woke up to the shocking news that what they were actually going to do was build the country’s largest and most advanced droneport, making use of all the newly available public airspace to turn the city into one of the most logistically convenient places on planet earth. And that was the beginning of a whole chain of surprises.

Over a couple of days of speaking to people, now adults, who grew up with the project, I come to understand why everyone is so fond of this place. Once construction began, it... did not stop. Every joke about snags and bureaucratic screwups that people made just did not materialise. Work even carried on through the rains. They used run-quiet generators. They installed a temporary solar plant on-site to charge the lights and equipment and stuff. Then, midway through construction, it was announced that the plant would be made permanent and tripled in capacity to power the droneport independently from the main grid – this way, people could still get things moved around when the main grid failed and broke as it did every year.

Hordes of citizens would gather at the site, eyes wide as highways, watching target and after target being achieved and deadline after deadline being met. And on opening day, they whooped and cheered for a public works project’s completion for the first and last time in their lives.

The droneport is an amazing place. It exists for one thing and one thing only – moving things around. Simplest case: you book your drone, it comes to you, you put your stuff on it, you tell it where to go, and it goes there to drop it off. There are tens of thousands of them on slim frames, glistening in the evening sun and charging up as I walk through the landscaped paths. This place is also a park, and a small part of the airport’s old runway has been preserved as a thoroughfare where you can sit and eat food from anywhere in the city – because, of course, it’s delivered to you. It’s even cheap, because to the surprise of absolutely no one, the entire project paid for itself less than fifteen years after opening to the public.

Of course, the droneport has eliminated the need for an entire overloaded and underpaid workforce of people working in goods movement and delivery; the government has apparently announced a new fleet of heavy-duty, larger units that can apparently be used to move vehicles and large pieces of furniture between warehouses and so on, but also apparently, the public is torn on the issue and voting on it at the governance terminals next month. But for now, this place is a success and a dream that has become reality. I lazily saunter over to a glowing screen and book a drone to take my quite heavy backpack to my place of stay; I want to take a relaxing walk without lugging it around. It asks me if it should pick up a hot meal on the way. I decide that’s a great idea and nod in agreement. In thirteen seconds, a whizzing thing that's surprisingly quiet lands in front of me and says, “Kannada or English, Dr. Chinnappa?”

I admit to whoever is reading this that I felt a bit emotional at this moment. I say my preferred language. The thing asks me if it can pick up my goods, I nod in agreement, it picks up my backpack, loads it onto itself, wishes me a good evening, and flies off fast enough that it takes a bit of an effort for my eye to follow it until I cannot anymore and it is lost to the evening sky.

I have not had a good day. I’ve had an amazing one.