Articles by Shobana Radhakrishnan

Shobana Radhakrishnan is Associate Editor at Citizen Matters. She keenly follows the impact of development on marginalised communities through an intersectional lens. Before relocating to Chennai in 2022, she reported from Madurai for the national daily The New Indian Express. Over the course of her career, she has covered several key elections, including the Tamil Nadu Assembly Elections (2021), the Rural Local Body Polls (2021), the Urban Local Body Elections (2022), and the Parliamentary Elections (2024), as well as cultural events such as Jallikattu. Known for her extensive reportage on the urban housing crisis, her four-part series on how state-led evictions propel domestic violence in Chennai’s resettlement areas was shortlisted for the 2024 Kamla Mankekar Award for Journalism on Gender and her photo story, Life in Single-Room Homes in Chennai, received a special mention (runner-up) in the Ashish Yechury Memorial Awards for Photojournalism. Shobana holds a Master’s in Mass Communication and Journalism from Pondicherry Central University.

A study by the Chennai-based NGO Information and Resource Centre for the Deprived Urban Communities (IRCDUC) was conducted in five resettlement colonies — Perumbakkam, Semmenchery, Gudapakkam, Navalur and All India Radio (AIR) Site, was carried out with an objective of examining and understanding the issues faced by those resettled families. The findings show that there is an urgent need for the government to intervene as pointed out by Vanessa Peter, Founder of IRCDUC who had said that the study highlights the key issues that have to be looked into while framing the policy. Some of these had already been flagged…

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Those tagged as ‘encroachers’ are the victims of the historical marginalization process, says Founder of Chennai-based NGO Information and Resource Centre for the Deprived Urban Communities (IRCDUC) Vanessa Peter. A study by the NGO reveals that limited access to basic facilities, especially during the pandemic, has increased the existing vulnerabilities of the communities who are grappling with the adverse impacts of resettlement.  Life on the margins The report titled ‘Life on the Margins - Access to Basic Infrastructure Facilities in the Resettlement Sites of Chennai’ points out several key issues pertaining to living conditions at resettlement areas. It has been…

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