Articles by Subramaniam Vincent

Two major government functionaries will leave office shortly. One is Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa. The second is Justice Santosh Hegde of the Lokayukta. BSY is being forced out by the BJP top brass to contain political fallout of Karnataka's massive mining scam in the ongoing BJP-Cong tug of war on who is more corrupt. A defiant BSY is not going to be happy. (Hopefully the Reddy brothers will be asked to quit, too.) No more bouquets. File Pic: BSY calls BJP's L K Advani in New Delhi in September 2010. Press department, GOK. But when Santosh Hegde demits…

Non-compliance is being captured live in Bangalore by netizens logging on the traffic police's facebook pages. Grab from BTP's Facebook page, pics posted by citizens.   Another grab from BTP's facebook page.   And another...   For more photos posted by citizens on Bangalore Traffic Police's Facebook page, go here ⊕

Yes, we all do. After all, malls are nice places to be in. They are structured spaces, they have clean toilets, swanky floors and always running escalators. People dress nicely to ‘go to the mall’. Even the outsides of malls are paved nicely compared to our very dusty streets. So much so that youngsters - girls and boys - just love to ‘hang around’ and have fun.Everyone in our malls is usually polite. Ever seen a desi street fight break out in a mall? In the mall, we become a ‘mall public’, i.e. more civil, even as on the streets…

The Sankey Road trees might have survived longer had the Mayor Sharadamma Ramanjaneya initiated a meeting of the Tree Authority of which she is the convener. But Shardamma is not aware of the Tree Authority for Bangalore. The authority is supposed to hear the public's complaints on tree felling. Citizens and organisations can appeal decisions by forest department officials such as the BBMP Tree Officer, permitting or disallowing cutting of trees in the city. One of the trees BBMP cut during the midnight operation on June 30th-July 1st. Pic: Yogaraj Mudalgi. The top forest official in BBMP limits, Deputy Conservator…

A 63-year old former BBMP official M B Krishnamurthy, is one of over dozen people arrested so far at the Sankey Road protests. Krishnamurthy, a diabetic patient and self-confessed tree lover, spoke to Citizen Matters from Vyalikaval Police Station where he was detained along with green activists. Ironically, Krishnamurthy is from the same BBMP engineering department that is currently felling the trees for roadwidening.  Sankey Road tree felling ongoing on July 1st. Pic: Lakshmi Sharath. For the past two days Malleswaram citizens have expressed fury against the BBMP for pushing forward with its roadwidening plan along a section of Sankey…

Sobha Nambisan is 1976 batch IAS officer (retired) and took over the reins of NGMA Bengaluru in May 2010.  After retiring from the IAS, she has been at the helm of affairs at NGMA.   NGMA, Bangalore was long-awaited and fought for by the artists community in the state before it finally opened in the city in early 2009. It's entry fee is Rs.10 and all events are free to the public. It is the central government's third such gallery and first one in south India. New Delhi and Mumbai have the other national galleries. Sobha Nambisan talks to Subramaniam…

Every year, Mothers Day comes and goes on May 7th just as Womens Day on Mar 8th. But the unwritten and unaccounted subsidy that capable, productive, educated, women provide to public life is usually forgotten.Most often, our elders get care at home from homemakers. Second, domestic help and cooks and their unpredictable schedules are 'managed' at the cost of our homemakers' time. Third, everything from receiving LPG cylinders, couriers, mail, to daycare and pre-school centre timings are run today around the premise of homemakers' availability.These assumptions about life itself will breakdown locally if more women pursued full-time work by their…

BBMP's 2011 garbage tender draft is a scam. Complaining about garbage is easy. Collecting it and transporting it is tough. Citizen Matters expose of one contractor who handles a part of Bellandur ward has shown this: Contractors continue to severely and illegally underpay garbage workers and cook the books. Collection is very irregular and some areas are left out completely. New residents are ignored. With no other choice, citizens, who are themselves not very civic minded, start dumping garbage in vacant sites and outside roads, unwilling as they are to chase down a contractor with no name and no face.…

It was a preventable fire that took nine lives and injured scores of others. On February 23rd, the Beyond Carlton trust, co-founded by a parent of one of nine who died in the Carlton Towers fire, conducted its memorial service at Manipal Hospital Auditorium. Shankar Bidari should have attended this memorial service. Not just in honour of the people who lost their lives, but in honour of the high-minded notification he issued in March 2010, just a week after the tragedy. Bidari in an exercise of police power unseen in Bangalore till then, had asked owners and leasers of all…

If a new road in your neighbourhood is desperately needed or the local BBMP contractor is burning waste locally instead of transporting it, or if you want to use your ward's BBMP funds to spruce up a rundown local playground, what will you do? Where will you start? You'll likely talk to your residents association office bearers and then one of them or you directly will try to reach your BBMP ward councillor. But let's face it. There are roughly 25000-50000 residents in a ward. How many such requests will your councillor be able to handle? Besides, councillors have their…