Life in Palm Meadows, Bangalore: A View From the Inside

On the day we headed back to the US, we had lived in Palm Meadows exactly one year. For a year and a half before that, we lived in one of Adarsh's other developments, Adarsh Palace, an apartment community in Jayanagar. We had heard a lot of good things about Palm Meadows and the quality of life and amenities, but the biggest attraction for us was that it would be close to our son's new school, Greenwood High.

Palm Meadows is on Airport-Varthur Road close to Whitefield and Sarjapur, about 45 minutes away from MG Road and Jayanagar, and about 20 minutes away from The International School of Bangalore, Indus International School, Inventure Academy and Greenwood High. It is also close to Ryan International, Gopalan International School, Deccan International, GEAR Academy and India International.

It is a gated community of about 600 single family homes, with 10 or more security guards manning the gates at any given time. Some houses are big and some are small, but most houses have at least three bedrooms each. Residents of Palm Meadows are a mix of original owners, returning Indians and expats.

In terms of amenities, it has a club house (with three swimming pools including an indoor pool and a kiddie pool, two restaurants, a full-size gym, sauna, spa, salon, library, and indoor and outdoor children's play areas), three grocery stores (a convenience store and 24-Letter Mantra and Namdhari's, two organic food stores), two gift shops and a tea/coffee/juice shop. The community has 24-hour water and electricity supply.

The layout is beautifully conceived, each house has its own lawn areas, the roads are neatly paved with footpaths, landscaping in the common areas is lovely and the residents' association has hired a veritable army of gardeners and landscapers who painstakingly work every day to preserve the vibrant trees, flowers and plants that are local to the area. There are at least 12 varieties of palm trees within the community and the lawns are manicured - literally - at the hands of day laborers wielding scissors and squatting on their haunches on the grass.



The clubhouse is a hub of activity in the community. There are swimming coaches on staff, tennis lessons, aerobics classes and Bollywood dance lessons are available. The community also has an arts center run by one of the residents that offers Indian classical dance lessons, piano/keyboard lessons and lessons in various other Indian musical instruments.

The streets within the community are filled with kids playing cricket or biking in the evening, mothers going for a walk with babies in strollers and with people walking or jogging in the early morning hours.

The main issues about life in Palm Meadows have to do with the rents and home prices, and cost and difficulty of hiring and retaining reliable, trustworthy domestic help.

When the community was first built close to 10 years ago, the original owners apparently bought the houses for around 80 lakhs. A few months before we left one of the houses had an asking price of 4.5 crores. Although there are many communities now coming up that are similar to Palm Meadows (Prestige Developers' Ozone, about five minutes away is one), the demand for housing and for the lifestyle Palm Meadows promises is mind-boggling.

The rents are not very far behind in terms of the shock factor. There are three resident real estate agents that have all the houses sewn up between them and manage to jack up rents to stratospheric levels. The rents are totally arbitrary (whatever the agent feels like quoting at that moment based on how desperate he or she thinks the renter is). The quote for the same house may have gone up by a few thousand rupees within a span of a few days. Most of their clients are expats, some of whom have no clue as to what is reasonable and what's not and will shell out whatever rent is demanded because they are in India for only a few days before they have to settle housing, schools, work-related issues, etc.

In fact, the situation is so good for home owners that many of them rent their houses out and they themselves go rent a house somewhere else in Bangalore because they make more money that way.

This air of a feeding frenzy pervades the domestic help market as well. The average drivers make is about Rs. 7,000/month. Some drivers make as much as Rs. 10,000/month, mostly working for expat employers. The situation is similar with the ladies that help with household chores. The minimum salary is about Rs. 2,000/month and sometimes as much as Rs. 6,000/month. It is not uncommon to find groups of drivers and other domestic helpers standing around discussing who's paying what and who's looking for helpers.

The section of the Palm Meadows population that is at the raw end of the deal is the group of returning Indians, most of them having purchased a house in Palm Meadows years ago and now are returning to an untenable situation.

Most residents feel that the problem is not with paying the domestic help the money (the economy is rewarding the high-tech sector, so why should the prosperity not trickle down?), but the fact that there is no assurance that you are getting reliable help. We discovered that our driver was making money on the side by using our car as a taxi service whenever the car was empty. And the way we discovered it was the police caught him and impounded the car for using a private car as a taxi. We also discovered later that he had come to us asking for a job although he was employed by one of the other residents. One day he just decided he wanted to make more money and started asking around and ditched his previous employer. They kept calling him for a week, they told me later, before one of their friends saw him at our house and they figured out what happened.

There are scores of similar stories. The issue is that there is a limited pool of helpers and now with Ozone already open for occupation, the situation is only going to get worse.

If you are aware of this issue and are prepared to stand your ground and deal with it and you are prepared to deal with traffic (especially over the Marathahalli Bridge, the only viable entrance to the Whitefield area from the rest of the city), Palm Meadows is a great place to live. It's a breath of fresh air, literally. I like to call it the bubble because it's so different from the rest of the city, but it's a very nice bubble.

Update:

1. Boo's comment to this post reminded me that I'd forgotten all about the service apartments and rooms in the clubhouse. Many companies have rented rooms (of which more were being built as we left) in the clubhouse for employees who transfer into their Bangalore offices for the short term.

2. One of the cons of living in a gated community like Palm Meadows, as a chat with Firang Squirrel, a friend and an expat from the US, reminded me, you totally miss out on the quintessential Bangalore - street hawkers selling fruits and veggies, kadle puri, the umbrella repair man and the knife grinder selling their services, etc. Of course, you also miss out on power cuts and water shortages. For now. Even Palm Meadows and other gated communities might not be able to avoid these in the near future if the expansion of the city keeps going at the current rate.