While working in Bangalore this week, the newspapers had a lot of stories about population growth - national, regional and by city. Projected growth for Karnakata State was to around 79  million and all will need power and water.

I was interested to note that Karnakata (the state Bangalore is in) has over 61 million people and Bangalore has well over 5 million inhabitants but is not classed as a big city.

In Edinburgh, we work within our parameters of geographical area and population, Glasgow being classed as the Scottish Gotham City and the population of Scotland is seen as an interesting statistic but irrelevant to our local plans.

Out here, power is supplied to a city larger than London which is growing at a fast pace. The weather is extreme, so air conditioning causes spikes and the city barely sleeps.

It brought home to me that while we have challenges when coping with city wide events, Mumbai with 19 million inhabitants (and monsoon floods that can lead to chest deep water in the streets) poses a different scale of risk and threat which has to be dealt with by practitioners like ourselves faced with BC planning for offshore operations.

I may pull together a workshop for people to talk about the challenges they have had to overcome when offshore locations have been added to their IT Service Continuity and Work Area Recovery resposibilities.

I was amazed by the "getting to work today" stories that I heard every morning. In the UK, they would have had a BBC News crew out interviewing them!

Cheers - Gordon