"Union Cabinet approves, clears the Bengaluru Suburban Rail project."
This was the headline in The Hindu on October 8, 2020. I stared at my phone, reading it three times to make sure I wasn't hallucinating.
Seven months earlier, just before the COVID-19 lockdown began, I had emailed my fellow campaigners; Sanjeev, Pranav, Naveen, and Syed. "After the lockdown ends," I wrote, "we'll regroup and push this all the way to the finish line." I thought we'd be back at it in three or four months.
We never regrouped. The campaign had gone silent. And yet, somehow, impossibly, we had won.
Ten years. Hundreds of meetings, blog posts, and emails. Countless rejections. And in the end, victory came when we weren't even in the room.
In 2019, Bengaluru earned an unwanted distinction: the world's most traffic-congested city. Commuters spent 243 hours per year in gridlock; the equivalent of watching 215 episodes of Game of Thrones. Sixty-kilometre commutes from neighbouring towns in rickety buses were commonplace. The city was choking on its own success.
Unlike Mumbai or Chennai, Bengaluru had no commuter rail system to take the burden off the roads. The average commute speed was less than 19 kilometres per hour; slower than a bicycle. The economic engine of India's tech capital was sputtering.
The government of Mysore State had formed the Bangalore Transport Service in 1956, taking over a private fleet of ninety-eight buses. The bus was the mainstay of public transportation in what was then a pensioner's paradise. But Bengaluru grew at thirty-eight percent every decade after liberalisation in 1991. The city's economy doubled every two years. Bengaluru leapfrogged the manufacturing age straight into a technology revolution. The bus couldn't keep up, and private vehicles took over.
We decided to fix it.
This book is the story of that decade-long campaign.
When I started working on the commuter rail campaign in 2009, I had no idea it would become a decade-long journey that would transform not just my city, but my understanding of how change happens in complex governance systems.
This book is not a manual on transportation policy. It's not a comprehensive history of Bengaluru's urban development. And it's definitely not a self-help book.
Rather, it's a chronicle of lessons learned—the hard way; about what it takes to move the needle on public policy when you have no formal power. An honest account of what happens when ordinary people decide the system needs to change.
More importantly, this is a field guide for anyone who wants to make their city better.
This book is for you if:
By the end of this book, you'll understand:
These aren't theoretical lessons. They're hard-won insights from a decade in the trenches.
The journey described in these pages was not mine alone. It was a collective effort by dozens of committed individuals who gave their time, energy, and hope to an idea that seemed impossible.
Pranav, Sanjeev, Naveen, and Syed weren't just collaborators; they were brothers-in-arms. When I wanted to quit, they kept going. That's how collective action works: the load shifts between us, but someone is always carrying it.
This book acknowledges many others; government officials who opened doors, journalists who kept the story alive, fellow activists from Citizens for Bengaluru and Whitefield Rising, and countless citizens who attended our events, signed our petitions, and believed their voices mattered. You'll meet them in these pages.
There's a quote often attributed to Margaret Mead that captures our journey:
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
I used to think this was inspirational hyperbole. After ten years, I know it's a practical description of how change actually happens.
Growing up in Bengaluru, I watched my city transform from a pensioner's paradise to a garden city to a technology hub. Like many who graduated in the 1990s, I rode the IT boom, working across Asia, the US, and Europe. After decades in technology, I discovered a second calling in 2007: civic activism.
The internet had made information accessible at unprecedented scale. Citizens were becoming less tolerant of inefficiencies in public services. Bengaluru was at the forefront of using digital tools for civic engagement. The number of nonprofits and citizens' groups was exploding.
I wanted to be part of that change.
I never felt at home in places where I couldn't change things. That restlessness drove me back to Bengaluru—a city where change seemed possible, if difficult. A city I could fight for.
After years of campaigning, I realised I needed to understand the systems I was trying to change. At age 47, twenty-five years after my undergraduate degree, I went back to school for a postgraduate program in public policy. That academic framework helped me articulate patterns I'd learned through trial and error—connecting my experiences to well-examined theories about how complex systems resist, and eventually accept, change.
Governance systems are complex: multiple actors with different incentives, institutional histories that shape current behaviour, path dependencies that make "obvious" solutions impossible.
Not knowing why people behave the way they do creates blocks in your path. Sometimes those blocks are procedural. Sometimes political. Sometimes personal. Often all three at once. Learning to distinguish between them, and knowing which strategies work for which, is what this book is about.
The title "Break the Block" works on three levels:
There are books about urban planning, transportation policy, and civic activism in India. But there's a gap between what those books teach and what actually happens when you try to implement change.
This book fills that gap.
I'm not a theorist observing from outside. I'm a practitioner who spent ten years inside this campaign. I have the emails to prove it; including the ones where officials said no, colleagues disagreed about strategy, and we made mistakes that almost tanked the whole effort. You'll read those emails in these pages. Some have never been made public before.
I'll be honest about the mistakes we made, the relationships we damaged, and the opportunities we missed. I'll share dismissive responses from officials who thought we were naive troublemakers. I'll introduce you to the government servants who opened doors when they could have closed them, and to the journalists who kept asking uncomfortable questions when it would have been easier to move on.
The lessons in this book are transferable. Whether you're fighting for better schools, cleaner air, affordable housing, or any other civic cause, the patterns repeat. The bureaucratic dance looks similar. The political calculations follow predictable logic. The coalition-building challenges mirror each other across issues and geographies.
This is the book I wish I'd had in 2009.
It starts with a website, a handful of strangers, and a question that seemed naive at the time: What if we actually did something?
Read this book for the story; the decade-long journey, the people, the setbacks, the victory.
Then visit breaktheblock.in for the lessons; the principles extracted from each chapter, ready to apply to your own campaign.
The story inspires. The website equips.
At breaktheblock.in/key-takeaways you'll find: