City: Bengaluru

BBMP has come up with clear guidelines to manage solid waste generated during festivals. After Ganesha Chaturti, BBMP has geared up for Bakrid. Top officials and department heads including Mayor Manjunath Reddy and Commisioner Manjunath Prasad met in late August and have finalised the arrangements. Awareness and enforcement No slaughter can be carried out in public areas - roads, footpaths in areas outside the homes or shop in public view. Only animals in the permissible list can be slaughtered. Segregation at source is compulsory. Health Inspectors and Medical Officers will supported by volunteers have been reaching out to the various…

We launched the crowdsourced Blackspot Mapping Project (garbage dump mapping project) in the last week of August, 2016. Two weeks into the project, we are already nearing 200 spots. As we reached out to people for help, we also faced many questions: Why are you doing this? What’s the intent? What will this data be used for? So many apps to map garbage and other issues - why should we contribute data to this project? In this article, we try to explain it all in detail. Why are you doing this? What’s the intent? Our cities suffer from multiple problems.…

Traffic congestion in ORR is getting worse - the long term solution is moving more and more commuters to mass public transport like the Metro or  BRTS. While the jury is out on which is better and faster to implement, we are losing precious time everyday in our commute. With the intention to reduce the commute time and avoid stress in waiting at traffic signals,  Rao Ganesh Janardhan, HSR Traffic Police Inspector has put together a series of simple changes which can improve the traffic flow from Marathahalli till Central Silk Board. The first of such changes have been implemented around…

Sometimes dry, barren-seeming patches of land have so much of interest in them. Recently, my friend Manivannan S spotted, in a small empty lot, this Painted Grasshopper. The wiki entry on this gorgeous-looking creature says that the grasshopper feeds on the poisonous plant Calotropis gigantea. Certainly, these grasshoppers had stripped all the Calatropis (milkweed) plants nearby. Striking in appearance... The mature grasshopper has canary yellow and turquoise stripes on its body, green tegmina with yellow spots, and pale red hind wings. The wiki also mentions the interesting fact that these grasshoppers, when squeezed or handled, upon slight pinching of the…

‘Swacch Bharat!’ We have seen a lot of hype about this programme in media but what is the reality? Of course, many things are happening in little pockets around the country, about which we read or hear. It does give us some hope that some day, maybe after half a century, we may see some difference at least in certain localities. However, as an individual, my experience has been a bit disappointing. Firstly, the once beautiful garden city of Bengaluru is turning into a city of concrete, garbage, polluted water bodies and chaos at a very fast pace!  Cleaning up…

Eco-friendly Ganesha festival has caught up in a big way this year, in Bengaluru. Dedicated teams of volunteers have been struggling day and night, along with the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) and Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB), to put proper disposal systems in place, and to spread awareness among people. Making one's own Ganesha using clay was the mantra for hundreds of citizens this year. The result was obvious on the first day of the festival itself. According to Yatish Kumar K C, Additional Commissioner for BBMP West Zone, on the first daym there were 1350 clay Ganesha…

Shivany Dowlat, a 7th grader at GEAR Innovation International School, concluded the presentation of her project on miscible and immiscible liquids with a trick question. “Do you keep our lakes clean?” If the answer was yes, she would quickly point to the lake directly behind her, Soul Kere off Sarjapur Road, and rebut. Soul Kere looks cleaner than many of Bengaluru’s lakes, but it still had small trails of trash visible from where Dowlat was standing. Pic: Kate Clark “Look at the plastic,” she said. “People come in and throw it, why? There’s a dustbin right there… You don’t keep…

On 26th May 2016, I made an appeal outlining a 3-point program for this monsoon "Let us send some rain water to our lakes" by clearing the storm water drains that carry precious rain water. "Great idea!" but.."easier said than done", "clearing drains is not as simple as spot fixing"  Those were some of the reactions. It made me even more determined to try harder, to get things started, to understand practical difficulties better. I'm a software engineer by profession and learned over the years that without a working prototype no one will give you a chance for your great…

Nation-wide strike ... some thoughts. a) People who feel that they are not sharing in the economic gains of the country resort to strikes. That much is understandable. And we must do something about this - inequality at these high levels is harmful in many ways. b) The public at large, however, is tired of strikes - especially because in addition to economically motivated strikes called by disaffected workers, there is another set of strikes called by employees of over-staffed public sector organisations that most people think should have been closed long ago, because they are just a drain on…

File pic: Mayur Channagere A press release issued by the Karnataka Department of Information and Public Relations on July 30th about Bengaluru Vision Group sub-committee’s traffic related decisions related to Bengaluru has ruffled feathers. A section of citizens have questioned the sub-committee for taking unilateral decisions for Bengaluru, instead of remaining just an advisory group, as noted by the government during the formation of the Vision Group (Bengaluru Blueprint Action Group or BBPAG). A lot of information has been floating around about the decisions taken by the sub-committee: starting with their declaration of 12 roads as high density roadsto their intent of…