Why is Karnataka not bothered about developing multiple cities like in Maharashtra or Tamil Nadu?

 You mean “developing multiple cities” mean industrial development?

Karnataka as such has its natural beautiful cities in western ghats, river basins etc. It also has IT, Garment, Service industries in Bengaluru and Mysuru.

Why to spoil Karnataka with Manufacturing and polluting industries? If at all any naturally diadvantaged cities need to be developed - the fire has to be with Lingayats and Vokkaligas.

I am reproducing the story of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu:

Manchester of the South; Light Engineering Powerhouse of India’—these are the usual catchphrases used for Coimbatore, a district in Tamil Nadu (TN) that produces roughly 15 per cent of the country’s cotton yarn, generates 45 per cent of its knitwear exports, and meets half of the domestic pumpsets requirement

At one level the basis for these appellations defies conventional explanation. Coimbatore possesses none of the classic attributes associated with mainstream industrial centres. It has no abundance of mineral wealth to speak of. The Kongunad region of western TN—mainly Coimbatore and Erode districts—is landlocked, surrounded by the Western Ghats and hills on almost all sides. Being far removed from the major ports—Chennai is over 500 km by road, while it is 450 km to Thoothukudi and 190 km to Kochi—Coimbatore enjoys none of the location advantages accruing to Mumbai, Surat, Jamnagar, Kolkata, or Visakhapatnam. Neither has it been strategically positioned like Ahmedabad on major commercial routes connecting the ports with the principal towns of the hinterland.

Historically, the Kongu upland plains may have served as an important gateway for troops and commodity movement over the Ghats through the Palakkad gap. Being in the middle of the southern peninsula also made it a buffer of sorts between the rulers of the great Tamil valley centres and those in the Mysore Deccan and west coast kingdoms. Even these functions were undermined by the thick forest cover and lack of good roads, which meant that the region was sparsely populated right till the early part of the nineteenth century.

Also, never in its history has Coimbatore reaped the concomi tant economic benefits of being a political or administrative headquart- ers like Delhi, Kolkata, and Chennai, a financial capital on the scale of Mumbai or, for that matter, an ancient temple town a la Madurai, Thanjavur, Ramanathapuram, and Kanchipuram.

Last, but not least, Coimbatore’s emergence as one of India’s pre- eminent manufacturing hubs has been brought about not by Nattukottai Chettiars or other traditional mercantile interests but by industrialists of two communities—the Kammavars and Kongu Gounders—whose primary vocation is farming.

That would convey an impression of a region with a wellendowed agroclimatic regime, buttressed by perennial rivers and munificent monsoons. Again, the facts point otherwise.The western zone districts of Coimbatore, Erode, Karur, and Dindigul receive an average annual rainfall of 714 mm, which is not only below the all-India level of 1,190 mm, but even the overall 925 mm figure for TN. Indeed Kongunad lies in a veritable rain-shadow, rendering it the driest region of the state.3 It has also not been blessed by extensive irrigation works of the kind seen in the Cauvery delta or the Vaigai and Tambraparni rivers in the southern Tamil districts.

Unlike the relatively dry and newly settled Kongu country, these systems have been the backbone of a fecund rice-based valley civilization stretching back to their early Chola and Pandya builders,and capable of sustaining two, or even three, crops a year.

How Coimbatore has risen to what it is today, in spite of all its perceived inherent infirmities: More specifically, two main communities that have contributed to its ‘Manchesterization’ and transformation into a land of foundries, machine shops, and engineering units fabricating a whole range of goods from castings, motors, and compressors to pumpsets and wet grinders. If the evolution of Chennai and its neighbourhoods into a major engineering and automotive hub owes a lot to Tamil Brahmin groups like TVS and Amalgamations, the same can be said about the Kammavars and Kongu Gounders vis-à-vis Coimbatore.