San Francisco and Bangalore sister cities?

Bangalore, May 11: San Francisco, the West Coast city of the United States has taken a initiative to rope in Bangalore for sister city arrangement on the line of China's Shanghai, Mr Jim Herlihy, high level representative from the office of the Mayor San Francisco informed here last night.

Speaking after attending a reception meeting hosted by Bangalore Chamber of Industry and Commerce, Mr Jim informed that both Bangalore and San Francisco share common features in many areas.

He said that San Francisco Mayor Mr Gavin Newsoms had shown keen interest to have Bangalore the technical hub of India as its sister city and taken initiative to complete the formalities. He said the Mayor was scheduled to visit to Bangalore next year once Memorandum of Understanding with the State of Karnataka was signed.

Mr Jim said that two technically advanced cities share many common things and some very different and becoming two sister cities would help to forge lasting relationship and facilitate better trade, cultural and educational opportunities. "Bangalore will be a great partner to work with and Bangalore city was stand-out with most logical conditions when Mayor of the San Francisco looking for an Indian city for sister city relationship", he said.

He said he had talk with Karnataka Chief Secretary P B Mahishi and other senior officials concerned on the proposal and the response was exciting and expressed confidence that signing of accord for the MOU would be done shortly.

San Francisco would be the third city to have sister city relationship with Bangalore after Rio and Minsk. He said that both Bangalore and SF cities having emerged as technological hubs of the world in the field of Information Technology, Bio-tech and centres for other cutting-edge technologies. Both the cities could work together in taking the things forward. There were tremendous opportunities for both the cities to work and share their expertise in the field of solid waste management, medicine, infrastructure development, traffic management, power and other high-tech areas.

He said that Bangalore would be the second city after Shanghai to have sister city status and expressed confidence that the relationship with Bangalore would be equal to better than Shanghai relationship. BCIC president Mr Venkat Kedilaya, who also spoke on the occasion has said that Bangalore which had emerged as the Knowledge capital of India and United States dominates new economy investment in the city. The service sector in the country had given India a tremendous exposure in the United States and Bangalore coming closer to San Francisco would help in many ways to find solutions especially its traffic chaos, he said.

During the interaction Mr Jim promised to help in getting direct flight facility between Bangalore and San Francisco. Both top two Indian Private Airliners Kingfisher and Jet Airways have proposals to operate direct flight from Bangalore to SF. He also promised to share expertise in the area of fighting global warming.

UNI