City: Bengaluru

With the onset of IT&BT industry, women work in night shifts. It is the responsibility of the firm to provide office transportation to such employees. Pic: Akshatha M When the sexual assault incident on a woman BPO employee came to light a few days ago, a general opinion prevailed all over. Police as well as public believed that the unfortunate incident would have been avoided, had the BPO company she was working for provided her official transportation facility to reach home safe. There are rules in place which mandate providing transportation to women who work after 8 pm. However, the…

In the early 70s, my visits to Delhi and Calcutta involved late night travels within the city. During my trips to Japan during 1985-95, my working hours were most unpredictable extending beyond midnight most days and I’d travel back to my hotel by myself. Recently between 1995 to 2009, my usual practice was to drive back home from e-city in the late hours. I am not sure whether cities was safer or I was just lucky. Nevertheless we have to face cruel realities of today. I understand as young women you are raring to go and want to have the freedom to…

  Bengaluru this week October 8th 2015     CITIZEN MATTERS Bangalore's own interactive newsmagazine Speak up, it's your city!     In this edition, we start a new series that provides Insights into Bengaluru. We start with an indepth story on the financial issues of Bengaluru’s poor and the vicious cycle of debt. Also read about the newly elected women corporators to the BBMP council and the latest happening on the Agara-Bellandur SEZ front. Check out our features on the Feed Your Neighbour initiative, and about one of Bengaluru's forgotten architects, Otto Koenigsberger. Are you following us on social media?…

Jörn Rhode, German Consul General, Anne-Katrin Fenk, MOD Institute, Rachel Lee, MOD Institute, Habitat Unit @ TU Berlin and Madhavi Desai, CEPT University, Ahmedabad at the launch of OK India. Pic: MOD Institute In early September 2015, MOD Institute, an urban action and research institute based in Berlin and Bengaluru, and the German Consulate General Bengaluru, released the book, Otto Koenigsberger: Architecture and Urban Visions in INDIA. The books traces German architect Otto Koenigsberger’s time in India, and how his planning and design concepts continue to be relevant for urban development in India even today. Koenigsberger in India Story has…

Counsels of Mantri Developers have tendered an unconditional apology in the National Green Tribunal (NGT) on Tuesday, October 6th, 2015, with regard to the contempt case filed against them. Namma Bengaluru Foundation and Forward Foundation had filed the contempt case in the NGT after an expert committee member was reportedly stopped from entering Mantri Developers site at Agara in Bengaluru for inspection and his GPS device was snatched. According to the order posted on the NGT website, legal Advisor of Mantri Developers Bhubnendra tendered an unconditional apology. Mantri Developers Managing Director Sushil Mantri who was present in the court, along…

Women corporators have outnumbered men in the new BBMP council. Pic: Akshatha M “As a teacher, I have always practised discipline, cleanliness and hygiene. This does not satisfy me enough, I want to render my service across Bengaluru. Hold the vision, trust the process.” These were the words of an aspiring corporator candidate who filled our Candidate Survey form, before BBMP elections. A B A-Tch graduate, she appeared to be a confident and strong woman in the candidate information form. The form was quite impressively filled. Now she has won the election and is a corporator. With a hope to…

“This Dusshera, my aim is to try and ease Bangalore’s hunger problem.” So begins Mahita Fernandez’ post on the Facebook group “Feed Your Neighbour”. Pic: facebook.com/groups/421419554714295 The idea for the initiative, Feed Your Neighbour (FYN), came to Mahita in the wee hours of a night when she woke up hungry. She says, “I woke up with a rumbling stomach around 3 am and felt thankful that I had food to eat. I then thought about the thousands in the city who are probably hungry and have nothing to eat. The very next morning, I put down the idea on paper…

Early this century, Whitefield caught the attention of the world with the setting up of IT Parks and world-class gated ­­­communities. It became a symbol of modern India, a hub of smartness. Whitefielders, including techies and farmers, immigrants and locals, rich and poor, bicyclists and water tanker drivers, are still working hard to stay in the limelight. It’s hard to stay in the limelight by creating a few startups and a couple of fancy homes, Whitefielders have found. It’s easier to gain attention by extraordinary egregious behaviour as a community – lessons learned from the reality TV shows. Famous lake…

Alamelu works in one of the flats in a nearby apartment complex. After returning to her home in Swatantrapalya, she prepares incense sticks. Pics: Shree D N Sitting on the floor in her two-room house in Ragigudda EWS quarters, Rajeshwari N, a domestic worker and mother of two, says that she hopes to leave the locality within next two-three years. She has borrowed over Rs 2 lakh to pay the Slum Board for house allotment and to pay off her relatives who wanted to stake claim to the house. Rajeshwari has been living in the area–which was Ragigudda slum earlier–for…

Pic: Sameer Shisodia The vehicle-free street initiative being tried out at HSR layout as an experiment is a good idea, for reclaiming common spaces. Its success and viability, however, depends on ‘we, the people’, who are responsible for making it workable. It can be done, and I have seen it working elsewhere. In Cambridge (UK), car owners park their vehicles on the periphery of the city and take feeder buses so that the city centre doesn’t get clogged. No one grumbles; no one seeks exemption; no one tries to break the rules. No fare concessions are offered, either. Around Harvard…