Articles by Navya P K

In mid-February, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike went into a tizzy as COVID clusters were identified in different parts of the city. Emergency meetings were held, new guidelines issued, entry of travellers from two neighbouring states restricted. Does this mean the city will soon see a second wave? After a major peak in cases last year, COVID positivity rate and case fatality rate had been steadily declining in Bengaluru. While positivity rate indicates the percentage of positive cases among those tested, case fatality rate (CFR) is the percentage of deaths among those who tested positive. The following graph, from the…

Civil society in Bengaluru erupted spontaneously to protest the state government’s plan to set up a tree park in Turahalli Mini Forest, south of the city. A Jhatkaa.org campaign to save the forest garnered over 13,000 signatures. Turahalli is one of the last remaining forest patches within the city. The Forest Department began work on the project without either a public consultation or placing the project details in the public domain. The project is part of Chief Minister C M Yediyurappa’s ‘Bengaluru Mission 2022’. Following sustained protests, Forest Minister Aravind Limbavali and Minister of Co-operation and the area MLA (Yeshwantapur…

On 29 September, 2009, the Supreme Court ordered that the authorised construction of any religious structure should not be allowed in streets, parks of other public places. The order applied to every state in India. In case of structures built before the date of the court order, state governments were to make decisions on a case-by-case basis. Yet in Bengaluru, we still see religious structures popping up on public land. This was because the Karnataka government or BBMP took hardly any action to implement the SC order - structures that came up since September 2009 were not demolished, and no…

In August 2019, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike had invited citizen groups and other organisations in Bengaluru to adopt streets. Under this volunteer initiative, the adopter has to maintain streets and ensure their visual cleanliness. Nearly one-and-half years later, the project is yet to kick off. D Randeep, Special Commissioner (Solid Waste Management) at BBMP, says the delay was due to COVID and that the programme would likely be resumed in the first week of February. “During COVID, we did not want people to come out together and do community work, which would be required under AASI. Before COVID, we…

A separate law for Bengaluru’s governance, to solve the city’s countless civic problems, has been on the cards since 2008. But when the state Legislature eventually passed the BBMP Bill on December 11, it seemed that years of deliberations on the law had been futile. It was in 2008 that the Kasturirangan Committee report on ‘Governance in the Bangalore Metropolitan Region and BBMP’ suggested a separate municipal law for Bengaluru (instead of the Karnataka Municipal Corporations Act, 1976, that applies to all corporations in the state). In 2010, the ABIDe task force - constituted by the BJP government under B…

Earlier this decade, ‘new political movements’ focusing on transparency and fighting corruption -- such as India Against Corruption -- were the flavour in many Indian cities. As Kerala goes into election mode with local bodies polls this week, several such movements at the local level have fielded independent candidates for city corporations and municipalities across the state. Most of these movements are new, some being formed in the last few months even, but are mostly helmed by those with some experience in social work or activism. These groups have for now avoided political affiliation, and consider themselves an alternative to…

In the concluding part of this two-part series, we look at what prevented builders and the government from rushing to the aid of construction labourers during the lockdown. In Part 1 'Why Bhuvilal Mahato stayed back in Bengaluru' we saw how migrant workers who were looked after by their employers, did not feel the need to leave the city. For migrant workers in Bengaluru, the promise of deliverance after a traumatic locked down lasted briefly. No sooner did Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa announce shramik special trains to ferry them back to their States, the Confederation of Real Estate Developers’…

Migrant workers from Bihar wait at the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre, only to be turned back by the BBMP after three days, in early May. Pic Credit: Senthil S Although construction activity in Bengaluru got a go-ahead, Ramachandra returned to his family in Bihar during that brief window when the government ran trains for migrant workers. He had started work at a construction site six months ago. His new home was in a labour camp in Ulsoor, with 400 other workers. Though he had worked through March, he was not paid. The contractor said the builder had not paid him.…

The whole country is in lockdown in the hope of containing coronavirus. But as WHO has warned, lockdowns alone aren’t enough to tackle the pandemic. A critical step in containing coronavirus is contact tracing -- identifying anyone who came in contact with an infected person, quarantining and monitoring them. But in many of our cities, particularly in north India, contact tracing has been poor or even non-existent. Besides, there’s been large scale and blatant violations of the Central guidelines on mandatory quarantine of those who have returned from abroad. The worst offender is perhaps Bhopal, which doesn’t seem to have…

Supplying clothing to some of the major global brands, many garment factories have been paying a pittance to their workers. On May Day, Bengaluru’s garment factory workers, 90 percent of whom are women, demanded that companies pay them arrears as per the state government’s draft notification on wage hike last year. Hundreds of workers, mostly women marched from Kanteerava Stadium to Peenya, demanding action on issues ranging from poor pay, to working conditions to safety. The women held the protest under the banner of the Garment Labour Union (GLU). The union says that the companies in Bengaluru owe Rs 1862…