Articles by News Desk

Tariffs are the single most important economic tool to control individual resident’s water usage. Many apartments often bundle water charges into a single maintenance account. But this keeps the expense of water consumption invisible. RWAs must have a Cost Account for water separately. RWA Management Committees need to consider various parameters to arrive at the tariff. What cannot be measured cannot be managed. The first step is to measure water consumption and calculate the total cost for getting water into a resident's flat. See part 1 of this series: Where does Bangalore get its water from? To read, click here.…

It is common knowledge that India is passing through a tumultuous period in her democratic governance. Though postmodern democracy has many drawbacks and has been dominantly designed by many nations, it needs to be recognized that the world in our times has irreversibly arrived at democracy as the most acknowledged healthy way of governing nation states. It is also recognized that most nation states have adopted representative democracy as a pragmatic way of respecting citizen’s power. In the evolution of representative democracy several types of electoral systems have been invented, developed, modified etc. Nations with known dominant ideologies have developed…

Time is now ripe for bringing in systemic changes and strategies to take Bengaluru on a road towards a sustainable solution for handling and processing of solid waste according to the MSW Rules 2000 notified by the Ministry of Environment & Forests. As an important step towards managing Municipal Solid Waste Management (SWM) as well as to evolve and implement strategies and action plan for Bengaluru getting back its glory as a clean and green city, the Government of Karnataka, Urban Development Department constituted an Expert Committee (EC) under the Chairmanship of Commissioner, BBMP and seven other experts to advise…

The residents of Chaithanya Samarpan layout at Kadugodi, north of Whitefield, started smiling in late May when pre-monsoon showers blessed Bengaluru and then continued into June. Water stopped in a storm water drain. It gets diverted into the collection chambers through the PVC pipe shown. Pics: Rainwater Concepts. But their smiles were not just because the rain brought much-awaited respite from the heat wave of April and May. It was because earlier this year the Samarpan owners' association had initiated a massive rainwater harvesting project for the layout. A network of water trapping, filtering and harvesting structures were built underground.…

On 11 June 2013, Suvarna News 24X7 and TV9 news had reported that the Mayor, Venkatesh Murthy, asked for the concessionaire agreement between the Maverick Holdings and the BBMP, related to Ejipura Economically Weaker Sections Quarters. However, chief engineer Rangaraju, who took over from erstwhile chief engineer B T Ramesh, said that the file was missing. Citizen Matters' effort to try to know why the Mayor wanted the files did not receive any reply, as the Mayor asked us to talk to the BBMP Commissioner. The Commissioner, Lakshminarayan, remained unavailable over phone for any clarifications. But here is the ‘missing’…

Those who care to pause and observe would have perceived many interesting political developments in Tamil Nadu in the last few years. Of these, one of the most recent has been the student protests in support of investigating war crimes in Sri Lanka. Going by the reactions that one normally sees in the mass media, different events are perceived in isolation in the Indian media, resulting in some degree of empathy, some sympathy, but mostly dismissal, if not disparaging reactions, about the position of the state and how it has forced the foreign policy initiatives and so on. However, like…

Bangalore consumes 2000 MW of power. What does this mean? We often see in the news that so much of MW of power is required for the city, and so much is the shortage. What is it all about? How is this calculated? This is a highly simplified attempt to explain it. So, please don't compare it with what you read in textbooks!  Electricity means, flow of 'current' in a metal-wire (conductor). 'Current' is flow of electrons. It's like a series of cars moving at the same speed on a highway. Does it mean that for a given size of…

A small but significant monetary gesture came from a concerned group of children from Indiranagar wanting to do something for their deprived counterparts of EWS. They approached ActionAid to doing something memorable for the deprived homeless children. Consequently, a children's summer camp 'Chinnara Loka' was planned for 28 May and 29 May, 2013.Around 35 children participated from the EWS homeless community. The two days were spent in singing, painting and games which were designed to bring out their talents. Ananth, cultural child rights activist facilitated this programme. ‹ › $(document).ready(function(){ $('.carousel .carousel-inner .item').first().attr('class', 'active item');});We, the organisers were not surprised…

Pavan, a Bangalore-based sales professional in a company working as regional manager for India, needs to travel frequently to other cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Pune. If he has to catch the early morning flight to Delhi, he needs to reach the airport at 5.15am, which is not easy. There are limited number of buses at that hour; waiting for them is not a wise thing. Pavan has an easy solution: Book a cab to the airport the previous day. Shekhar Mahadev, a software engineer working in Bangalore, says, “I have to keep making a lot of trips to…

For Bangalore-based ecologist Harini Nagendra, whose name has just been announced as a winner of the 2013 Elinor Ostrom award, it is a bittersweet moment. Harini Nagendra and Dr. Ostrom at Kaikondrahalli Lake. Pic: Priya Ramasubban. The award has been instituted in the name of Elinor Ostrom, the USA-based scholar who received the Nobel Prize for economics in 2009 for her long standing body of work on the governance of the commons. For Harini, Elinor was, apart from being one of the most brilliant, incisive and deeply humanistic scholars, a very dear friend, collaborator and mentor with whom she worked…