Having immovable property as one’s asset, first in the form of a residential site and then a dwelling to live in comfort without any hassles, including the burden of rent steadily soaring, is an important agenda of every urban resident, triggering the buzz in real estate business in cities of all classes, including many towns which are expanding to city status. Mysuru, the then small city Mysore, hosting a population that could be counted in thousands until a few decades ago, unlike the present counting in lakhs, comprised a handful of areas with clear territorial boundaries that qualified to be classified as villages, with their residents engaged mostly on agriculture, rearing livestock, traditional trades and meeting the daily needs of the residents pursuing other callings, gradually morphing Mysore of old to its present Mysuru, with its former village- like areas having vanished into thin air. Thanks to advances in materials such as cement as well as steel and technologies of constructing buildings, accompanied by economic prosperity of the residents, along with influx from other regions of the country, Mysuru’s realty has already changed the city’s skyline after occupying land on which stood food crops and plants bearing fruits and flowers.

With the steady rise in the city’s population, the number of its residents in pursuit of owning residential and commercial property, has crossed the limit of satisfying even a part of that number, resulting in the authorities resorting to change former agricultural lands in the vicinity of the city into layouts for raising dwellings. We are well into the era of high rise structures.

Single-storeyed structures, both as residences of Mysureans and rows of shops trading in their necessities, as the elderly sections in their eighties can recollect, contributed to the city’s charming image, now a part of its history. That reality of Mysore’s past realty is now a casualty. The sprawling lands, both amidst the residences of Mysoreans of decades ago and in its immediate surroundings provided more than adequate green cover with full-grown trees and plants reared by the residents themselves, now looking grey of the concrete mass of structures, the second present reality created by the booming real estate activity. The civic body of the then Mysore never had it so good in both water supply and keeping the city free from garbage, now both gone out of hands, a reality that no Mysureans can miss.

Restricted space for this column not permitting a narrative to mention many other realities of the city’s unabated realty sector, the most worrisome reality is the gobbling up of vast-areas of Mysuru’s green land by real estate, from which there are no signs of redemption in days ahead, with the equation more people in Mysuru and more dwellings to house them. Land?