City: Bengaluru

Two years ago, Anirudh, father of a 9th standard student and resident of HSR Layout, decided to admit his daughter to a boarding school managed by a former athlete in Kodagu. Anirudh strongly feels that in a city like Bengaluru it’s not possible to send the budding athlete for training in Kanteerava Stadium twice a day due to traffic. So the child was shifted from Bengaluru to Kodagu with the sole intention of providing her a better athletics training. Mallika Jaswanth is a mother of two school-going kids. She is a resident of Old Airport Road and works as a…

RERA for Karnataka is an open, public group, devoted to the welfare of home-owners of apartments, villas or plots. We seek to improve the legal framework and its implementation, by working for quick and proper implementation of RERA and reforms in existing laws. We are also seeking reforms in the procedures and policies of agencies, such as KSPCB, BWSSB, BESCOM, BBMP, BDA etc to make the rules fair and more practical to comply with. Objectives To work for speedy and effective implementation of the RERA in the state of Karnataka. To drive reforms in various acts related to apartment ownership…

With persistence and passion, citizen volunteers supported by progressive BBMP rules, have been working tirelessly and successfully at bringing about a paradigm change in managing waste in their homes and waste reduction. This has been stopping once and for all the nasty careless habit of swinging a plastic carry bag full of mixed waste at the tip of the fingers, walking out to the nearest electric pole or open space and swinging it with a flourish. However, public waste bins have made a come back in Bengaluru, after a gap of 15 years. These waste drop boxes bypass all of…

The growth and development of humanity in the modern age kickstarted from the time of Renaissance. The hub of all new thoughts and ideas was Europe and it was the Silicon Valley of sorts back in the days. Colonial powers carried the ideas and the mindset with them as they traveled and took control of lands across the world. It intensified as we made rapid advances in technology in the late 19th and 20th centuries. But something else also happened at that time. Humanity went completely out of sync with nature and we declared war on the ecosystem that had…

I had visited recently a centre that issues Aadhar card in Banaswadi which is just a few kilometers from my home. They issued tokens and asked us to wait. As the time went by, the queue became longer. Suddenly I saw two men carrying a handicapped man in a bed sheet as he needed Aadhar card for himself. Even after seeing his condition, the staff working at the centre did not want to help him. He was siting down in the heat. Almost two hours went by but no one in the queue supported this handicapped man. I felt sad.…

  Hello again from Citizen Matters team! We’re back with our newsletter, to bring you more news and analysis. And our most popular story of the week - how this Sarjapur Road layout solved their water problems, with rainwater collecting, recharge, wastewater treatment and more. And they have no more need for water tankers! Read: Reaching water sustainability. The highlight: Why do schools hike fees? Pic: Shree D N After we look at what makes Bengaluru schools hike their fee, we know look at the other side. While there are schools that hike their fee arbitrarily, there are also schools…

Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) has started the trial of smart cards in a small scale, after unveiling it in a press conference on June 14, 2016. It will take two months to complete the trial and launch the card in full scale, according to sources from BMTC. It can be recalled that BMTC Managing Director Ekroop Caur had revealed the plans for this card in an interview with Citizen Matters. There was also a plan to launch Intelligent Transport System (ITS). This was done last month, however there are a lot more buses left out of the ITS net,…

Hoarding displayed on one of the major roads of Bengaluru. Pic: Akshath G V In the first part, we explored why BBMP is not making any money from illegal hoardings. Next part of the series tried to explore why the unauthorised hoardings are not removed. This part will examine the efforts being made to set the system right. A few attempts were made in the past to modify the existing policies related to advertisement. Strangely, every attempt so far has gone futile and reformation moves just did not take off. While implementation of the existing policy is a different aspect,…

From taking water for granted, to discovering water scarcity and now managing water sustainably without depending on water tankers, our Sarjapur Road community is very different from the rest of the neighbourhood suffering from water problems. Rainbow Drive (RBD) is a gated community established in 1998-99. Till 2004, no meters in individual houses, water was supplied free. A few houses had private borewells for their own use. After the Residents' Welfare Association was formed in 2004, they started to meter the supplied water at a nominal charge to recover the operational cost. They also decided to ban the digging of…

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