In April, 2020, Usha Rajagopalan, Chairperson, Puttenahalli Neighbourhood Lake Improvement Trust (PNLIT), had sent — like she always did since 2011 — the Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) to the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) to be renewed, fully expecting it to come through. “Later, in June, I realized that the MoU was not renewed and the other citizen-led lake groups had the same experience,” says Usha. BBMP has been signing MoUs with lake groups since 2011. Usha says: “The MoU states that we do not charge any entry fees or undertake commercial activity such as selling the lake water to…
Read moreIn many communities, the pandemic brought about a desperate need for a resource essential to survival: clean drinking water. Mumbai-based volunteers from the Ismaili Civic, a wider movement run by the Ismaili Muslim community globally, played a crucial role in the city by delivering water during the pandemic, earning praise both from doctors and the state government. In early June 2020, they began distributing clean drinking water to COVID19 centres, first to larger hospitals and then to smaller ones (which had cropped up due to increasing cases), continuing through the deadly second wave, supplying close to 40,000 litres of water…
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