Articles by Saachi DSouza

In August this year, Rakhi Naik, a domestic worker in Mumbai, was found pleading to the police at Khar police station by Aftab Siddique, a teacher and social activist in the city. Rakhi was on one of the many rounds she had made to police stations asking for help after filing an FIR in April. Through Rakhi, Aftab was able to unravel a complicated pattern of fraud in the city. Men claiming to be brokers and agents dupe people from the lower class out of lakhs of money and make affordable housing harder for them. It all started when Rakhi signed an…

Rekha, a fruit vendor in Kandivali east, has been selling fruits in the area for over 6 years now. Parked under a large umbrella that offers shade from the sun, she awaits customers. "The heat this year has been the worst in a long time, and it is only April. It will get worse," she exclaims, adding that the recent heatwave in the city has also affected her business since customers don't come out much and her fruits get spoiled in the scorching heat during the day. Rekha is also one of the many street vendors in Mumbai who conduct…

Modern lifestyles in cities often see most of us buying more, despite the acclaimed ‘Refuse, Reuse, Reduce, Repurpose and Recycle’ mantra. When tired of the clutter, we repurpose pre-owned belongings like old clothes and toys by passing them on to domestic help. But, a step further could help support underprivileged communities throughout the country. There are many organisations in Mumbai supporting local communities in need by distributing pre-owned items in the city and rural Maharashtra. “We can’t say we’re solving the poverty crisis, but there’s a need and we’re filling it,” says Pradeep Tripathi, founder of Green Yatra, a foundation…

The 6th report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), titled, 'IPCC 6th Assessment Report Working Group II (AR6)' was released globally on February 28th. Analysing environments of 195 member countries, the report has, this year, revealed that the global climate crisis is possibly much worse than we had thought. It states clearly that around 40% of the world's population is "highly vulnerable" to climate change. The IPCC report refers to Mumbai multiple times and says the city has new challenges ahead as it grapples with coastal degradation and temperature changes. Climate impact on the urban poor Mumbai is…

The history of water transport in Mumbai dates back to the Seven Islands of Bombay, which were under Portuguese possession. In 1661, they were handed over to the British, and between 1820 and 1857, the islands slowly became what was then known as Bombay. It was with the opening of the 'Overland Route', a transportation route that made it possible to travel to Europe, that Mumbai built its first steamer in about 1830. The route cut travel time down from five months to one and a half. By 1850, Bombay came into being. Trade between Europe and India was expanding, with the…

On February 3rd, India's richest civic body, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC)'s commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal unveiled the civic budget for the financial year 2022-23. The budget for this year is a whopping Rs 45,949.21 crore, a 17.70% jump from the previous year (Rs 39,038.83 crore). The focus of this year's allocation is on health, infrastructure and education. We've highlighted key points from the budget announcement. Big developmental projects Rs 3,200 crore for the Mumbai Coastal Road project Rs 1,300 crore for the Goregaon Mukund Rail projectNew security systems like Boom Barrier and Hand Metal Detectors to be installed at…

Since the onset of the third wave, a surge in home testing for COVID-19 in Mumbai has brought new challenges for the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). Mylab Discovery Solutions, the manufacturer of 'CoviSelf', a self-testing kit, which sold about 25,000 kits in Mumbai in December, saw its sales jump to about five lakh on January 7th. By January 11th, 96,000 people in the city had tested themselves using home testing kits. Of these, 3,000 had tested positive according to Mumbai's mayor Kishori Pednekar. And with no rule or law in place at that time making it mandatory for those doing home testing to report…

"We have lost everything. Who has reaped? still, we are displaced in our freedoms" are the opening lines of the poem ईरपाल (erpal), meaning grievance, by local Koli poet Shahir Pundalik Mhatre; documented by the Tandel Fund of Archives, an archival project run by artists Parag Tandel and Kadambari Koli. The poem hallmarks the many years of displacement of the Kolis of Bombay, and the reclamation of their lands by the city's industries. The city's earliest inhabitants, its vibrant fisherfolk, are now fighting a long battle with their own home.  Morning travels in the Mumbai local trains are usually marked…

In the early hours of 10th September, a tempo driver named Mohan Chauhan killed a 32-year-old Dalit woman in Sakinaka. The woman was found severely injured, bleeding in a tempo and was immediately hospitalised, after a First Information Report (FIR) was registered. CCTV footage recovered by the police found that the accused had raped and assaulted the woman with an unknown object. He was then booked for rape, and after she succumbed to her injuries, a murder charge was added to the FIR. The police allegedly recovered evidence that the two knew each other prior to the incident.  Additionally, on…