BANGALORE, India Citing signs of slowing investment in Bangalore, companies are confronting the state government over the

e decrepit infrastructure here, saying it is threatening the city's position as a primary global destination for investment from overseas. The Bangalore Chamber of Industry and Commerce says it is tired of the government's inability to deal with problems like traffic congestion, power shortages and inadequate airport facilities. To make its point, the group says it will boycott a government-sponsored information technology fair scheduled for November. The absence of the group's 450 members - including the Indian units of multinational corporations like International Business Machines, Texas Instruments, Motorola and Oracle as well as influential domestic companies like Infosys Technologies and Wipro - probably would sink the annual technology fair, known as BangaloreIT.in. Executives are concerned about what they maintain is a decline in Bangalore's attractiveness as a destination for investment. The chamber said that only 30 new companies set up operations in Bangalore in the year ending in March, compared with 52 the previous year. "We are asking the government to wake up," said Anant Koppar, president of the Bangalore chamber, "and take note of the traffic jams, potholed roads, power breakdowns and nonexistent public transport system and international-scale airport." Koppar is president of Mphasis, a Mumbai-based outsourcing company that has 8,500 employees and clients including Federal Express, Citibank and Hewlett-Packard. The confrontation is a test case for the infrastructure problems of several Indian cities, executives said. "Bangalore has been a model for Indian cities; its reputation goes beyond India," said Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairman and managing director of the biggest Indian biotechnology company, Biocon, which has 2,000 employees and plans to double that number in two years. "If successful, the city's struggle against bad governance will inspire citizens and companies in other cities."

P.G.R. Sindhia, finance minister of Karnataka, the state where Bangalore is located, said Monday that the government had been investing in the city. For more than a decade now, global companies have taken advantage of India's large, educated, English-speaking, low-cost work force by sending work to the country in the practice commonly known as outsourcing. Particularly in Bangalore, the trend in recent years has led to a growth spiral - a construction boom for buildings for outsourcing workers to live and work in, more cars and buses to ferry them to work and an increasing strain on the energy supply and airport infrastructure. "A big part of Bangalore's problem is that growth has exceeded everybody's wildest expectations," said Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys Technologies. Infosys employs almost 40,000 workers, and a third of them are based in Bangalore, where the company has its headquarters. Infosys and companies like it have their own bus services to bring employees to their suburban campuses and run independent generating units to make up for power shortages. Infosys and its top competitor, Wipro, run their own hotels to house employees and visitors. Recently stung by accusations that outsourcing companies were creating facilities only for their own use, some companies have come forward to help finance a $100 million elevated public expressway leading from the city to the suburbs where many of them are located. Now, company executives are starting to fear that India's cost competitiveness and Indian companies' growth are being constrained by the added expense of dealing with poor infrastructure. According to a recent survey by the consultancy McKinsey, 60 percent of 537 executives polled in India described infrastructure as a "significant constraint on growth," compared with 23 percent of their peers in other countries.