A bandh is an anachronism in a city today: on the one hand, this is India’s time to create 100 smart cities, and on the other, you have the "bandh city". Bengaluru , which is the tech capital of India, is lurching from one bandh to another. We should also look at the context in which a bandh in Karnataka 's capital operates. The city contributes more than 60% of the tax collection of Karnataka. If you shut down Bengaluru, it also means that you are shutting down the revenue earning capacity of the state to support the majority of its people.Then 98% of the state's software exports go from Bengaluru, which again means a huge impact.Additionally, one-third of India's IT professionals work out of the city. Therefore, for the country's IT industry, it is a big blow. These are staggering numbers that affect the city.Bengaluru has grown from 4 million to 10 million people in the past 15-odd years, and has accumulated a backlog of issues — from traffic to urban infrastructure-related bottlenecks. If you add issues of citizen safety to that list, people are definitely going to look at other cities to live in. The pull of Bengaluru will come down.Earlier, the city had a lot of advantages, such as the weather, the richness of local culture and the large number of educational institutions that supplied talented workforce. We are neutralising these advantages when citizens' lives become unsafe. The need, therefore, is to ensure security and law and order. As civilisation progresses, art, culture, sports, nightlife, etc take different hues and acquire a different gravitas. They become more important to citizens. If we compromise on all of these because of lawlessness, the city will lose its soul. And once that happens, there is little you can do to stop it from becoming another Detroit.Often, in politics, you find opposing parties taking a bipartisan attitude to an issue of public concern. It is about time that on certain issues that matter to citizens, mainstream political parties started adopting bipartisan positions so that we are able to see a confluence of thinking and a unification of purpose. Otherwise, the age-old dispute over Cauvery water will never be resolved.In the absence of state control and supervision to counter the violence in Bengaluru following the Supreme Court verdict on the sharing of Cauvery water, one is tempted to think that it was state-supported. The state machinery just did not do enough to control the large-scale rioting — and that accentuated the problem.The bandh was not reflective of the spirit of the city or the aspirations of its people. It was hijacked by a few anti-social elements who apparently had political cover. While Cauvery water is an emotive issue, the violence was clearly created by fringe elements. The government needed to step in and enforce law and order.No citizen in any part of the world likes to live in fear of what is going to happen if she steps out on the road. That fear permeated the minds of Bengalureans last week. I met a number of people who were impacted by the violence on the streets. By allowing fear to reach such levels, the government let its citizens down.I don't have sufficient knowledge to comment on the water available for Karnataka and the amount of water that should be released. That's a matter of science. More than the courts, it should be someone with a scientific background who should be deciding how much water should be released. Water is a basic issue that needs to be dealt with in many levels, including rainwater-harvesting and groundwater retention techniques. A better process of planning and urban design should help tackle these issues.First the government needs to reach out to the Opposition and come to a consensus that they will not allow the kind of violence we just saw to repeat itself. The man on the street should know that no politician is backing these agitation. Second, they should build confidence among the people of Karnataka that regardless of the amount of water released from a specific dam, they will be working on alternative methods to ensure enough water supply for people here. Otherwise, the worry that there will be no other water source will remain. It's important that people are assured that even if there is less Cauvery water, other sources will compensate.Finally, the government should take a decision to ban bandhs and it should limit the ability of anyone to agitate and bring an entire city of 10 million people to a standstill. You can't bring a metropolis to its knees: the right to livelihood is fundamental, and that right should not be compromised.(The author is chairman & managing director, Quess Corp Ltd)