Articles by Eshan Kalyanikar

When Bano Abdul Sattar (28) was a young girl living in Bandra east chawls, she could only do jobs that her family deemed appropriate for a woman. She picked up multiple jobs in her early teens; she helped her family run a roadside anda bhurji stall at night, worked as a tailor, and even as a mehendi artist. But this was far from what fascinated her. What captured her imagination when she was young were cars and the thought of driving one someday. And so, at the age of 16, she did just that. "Main na, chupke uncle log ko paise deti thi.…

The years 2013 and 2014 stand out in the State of Health report for Mumbai released by Praja Foundation. With a discrepancy of over thousands of deaths in those years in the age group of 0 to 4 for diseases such as hypertension, diabetes and tuberculosis, the data raises more questions than answers. Collected from all the 24 wards under Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) through RTIs up until 2015, the data shows strange figures for the cause of death among various age groups. For instance, the data shows that in 2013, 1,612 children in the age group of 0 to 4 died…

For over a decade now, residents of Indira Nagar slums in Mumbai's Sewree have been waiting for a road that would not be an invitation to diseases in their homes. But that has not happened yet. With the arrival of the monsoon, the road adjoining their makeshift houses gets waterlogged making their living conditions difficult and threatening public health.  "The water and mud accumulate when it rains heavily, even taxis don't come here. People here frequently fall sick in the rains. There have been so many people who have had dengue or malaria in the past," said 42-year-old Laxmi Harijan,…

Year after year, images of people wading their way through knee-deep water, potholes, and building collapses are splashed across newspapers and TV screens as soon as monsoons begin in Mumbai. Mumbaikars endure unsafe commutes without many choices. They register complaints on various platforms, and while Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) authorities claim to take note of their grievances, little materialises. A new report analysing councillors' performance confirms this. BMC's Councillors "do not appear to be interested in permanently solving day-to-day civic problems", states the report, released to the public earlier in July ahead of the civic body elections. "Instead, they show…

On June 30th, the Shiv Sena rebel leader Eknath Shinde became the 20th Chief Minister of Maharashtra, and Bharatiya Janata Party's Devendra Fadnavis returned to power as his deputy. In their first cabinet meeting, held hours after the oath-taking ceremony, the first decision they took was to shift the construction of the metro car shed for the 33.5 km underground Colaba-Bandra-SEEPZ Metro Project (Line 3) from Kanjurmarg back to the Aarey Milk Colony in Goregaon. Effectively affecting the Aarey forest as a whole. Backlash followed as environmentalists took to the streets in protest after two-odd years. Commonly known as 'Aarey…

When 36-year-old Rupesh Patil started fishing 20 years ago, taking over the reins of the business from his father, he used to catch a boat full of fresh Surmai (seer fish) or Javla (shrimp) regularly. "But the income in this business is not like before," he says. Patil is a fisher from Worli Koliwada in Mumbai, where other fisherfolk like him who fish at the nearby Cleaveland Bunder have been complaining of a falling catch for the past few years.  Adding to their woes are the rising fuel prices and the destruction that was left behind by Cyclone Tauktae in…

On June 22, 91 out of the 1,648 new cases of COVID in Mumbai were hospitalised, taking the total number of occupied beds to 666. The city makes up for more than half of the daily reported cases in the state as Maharashtra had 3,260 patients on the same day.  Even as cases in Mumbai have dropped since June 15th, when the daily load shot up to 2,348, and active patients have dropped from 14,146 on June 21st to 13,501 on June 22nd, the number of people occupying hospital beds has increased. Currently, there are 24,765 beds reserved for COVID patients. The latest…