San Francisco is turning its eyes toward India.
Next month, a delegation of city officials and corporate executives, led by Mayor Gavin Newsom, will be spending three days in Bangalore, where initial agreements on projects involving sustainable building, health technology, water treatment and solid waste management are expected to be signed. All areas in which Bangalore, India's version of Silicon Valley, have said it could use some help.
The trip also marks a coming-out party of sorts for San Francisco and Bangalore as sister cities. "It's our fanfare," says Jim Herlihy, co-chair of the San Francisco-Bangalore Sister City Initiative. Herlihy, a managing director of Deutsche Bank, and Madhav Misra, who formerly headed a hedge fund and private equity group at Citibank in San Francisco, have been quietly building on the relationship since the two cities officially became siblings, at Newsom's behest, last year.
As with San Francisco's growing relationship with Shanghai, the aim is to develop business and trade ties - sustainably, the organization's mission statement emphasizes - with an Indian metropolis that is exploding, technologically and geographically, with a population estimated to be 10 million by 2012. "Given Bangalore's growth rate, and the role Indians already have in the Bay Area economy, there's enormous untapped potential," Misra said.
The two co-chairs have already rounded up some heavy hitters. Board members include Kumar Malavalli, founder of San Jose's Brocade Communications, Vish Mishra, president of the Indus Entrepreneurs, an Indian-American business group in Silicon Valley, and Regis Kelly, who chairs the Bay Area Scientific Innovation Consortium. (A specific biotech agreement is on the November trip's agenda.)
Corporate sponsors range from Cisco Systems, whose LEED-compliant building - India's first - on its Bangalore campus will be highlighted on the trip, to Taj Hotels, a subsidiary of the giant Tata Group conglomerate, which numbers San Francisco's Campton Place among its U.S. properties.
The latter's involvement, along with Bangalore's UB Group, which owns the Mendocino Brewing Group (Red Tail Ale, Blue Heron) along with India's Kingfisher Beer and Kingfisher Airlines, points to the two-way-street nature of the relationship. "We want Indian investors and businesses to look at the Bay Area as a logical point of entry," Herlihy said.
Misra added: "As this becomes India's as well as China's time, we want to see the Bay Area benefiting from it."
More information on the San Francisco-Bangalore Sister City Initiative at www.sfbangalore.org.
Another passage to India: Coincidentally, the San Francisco delegation arrives one week after the Obama administration wraps up its business trip there.
This one's being led by another Bay Arean, Ro Khanna, a deputy assistant secretary in the Commerce Department. Khanna, formerly an intellectual property lawyer at the San Francisco office of O'Melveny & Myers, is the first Indian American to lead an official trade delegation to India.
He was not available to talk about the five-day trip to New Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, but the focus is supposed to be on energy efficiency, "clean" energy, and what U.S. companies could bring to the Indian table in those areas.
Despite India's demurrers on mandated emission reduction targets, it has been investing more in the renewable energy field of late. Last week, it signed an agreement with Scotland "to drive innovation in renewable energy and support both governments' goals to increase supplies of wind energy, solar power and biofuels," according to a Scottish government statement.
Time for the United States to play catch-up.
Blogging at sfgate.com/columns/bottomline. Tweeting at twitter.com/andrewsross. Tips, feedback: E-mail bottomline@sfchronicle.com.
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