City: Bengaluru

I have been pursuing a master’s degree in Sustainability in Helsinki for the past year and a half. Scouting for a thesis topic along with my interest in the intersection of water, communication and education brought me right back to Bangalore where I had studied and worked earlier in the areas mentioned above. This time, I was trying to look at how design interventions can enable public awareness and participation in the functioning of a sustainable urban water management system. My research was based around the Jakkur Lake — and this was for a specific reason. Bangalore and water Bangalore was once…

The Chord Road, or 'West of Chord' Road as it is popularly known, is an important road linking Tumkur Road in the North to Mysore Road in the South Bengaluru. As the name suggests it is a 'chord' — a straight line joining two points on a circle — cutting across the ever expanding circle that is Bangalore. Unlike most roads in Bangalore, when it was built several years ago a lot of planning went in to it — the road is a wide double road with service  roads on either sides. It had a beautiful canopy of Gulmohar and Rain…

On February 8th, 2014, Bangalore Bus Prayaanikara Vedike, an organisation of bus commuters and civil society organizations, organised a planning meeting to discuss a campaign for affordable bus services in Bangalore. This was organised in response to the steep rise in bus fares over the last year and a half to almost 50%, increasing the economic hardship for Bangaloreans. If a garment worker or a pourakarmika, who earns Rs. 5,000 a month, buys a monthly pass for Rs. 725 (Rs. 925 for red board buses), she shells out 15-20% of her income just for commuting, which increases if more people…

                                  A young tree lover at Neralu. Pic credit: Suchi Govindarajan   NERALU, the crowd-funded 2-day Urban Tree Festival concluded at Cubbon Park on Sunday, the 9th of February 2014. Citizens of all ages participated enthusiastically in tree walks, and appreciated the specially curated movies and the display of Rumale Chennabasavaiah’s paintings of Bengaluru’s trees. Visitors listened to a range of talks by noted naturalists, ornithologists, and Urban Ecology experts. Children learnt about trees and their importance through a range of experiential activities such as…

The Bangalore Traffic Police (BTP) seems to have new arsenal - an Andriod app for Bangalore road users. The app has been developed Shree Manu, an employee with a software firm, who builds apps as a hobby. Manu initially approached the BTP with a location finder app called Wherez U, that he had developed post the Nirbhaya incident in Delhi. The BTP posted a link to the app on its Facebook page, and the app was received rather well; it has been downloaded about 4000 times so far. Following this, a user gave feedback saying that it would be useful…

Members of NBF and BRACE holding the press conference.T S Vidhyadhar, D S Rajshekar, Mahalakshmi Parthasarathy, Ravindranath Guru, Subbu Hegde, Nitin Seshadri and others are seen in the picture. Pic: Nikita Malusare Citizen Action Forum (CAF) backed by Namma Bengaluru Foundation (NBF), will question the Akrama Sakrama Bill – 2013 in court shortly. This was revealed in a press conference hosted by NBF on February 5th, 2014. N S Mukunda, President of Citizen Action Forum, who spoke in the press conference, questioned as to why the buyers should be responsible for the mistakes made by the builder. Since the bill…

The Adugodi Annual Chariot Festival, Rathasapthami, starts on February 6th and will go on up to 9am, February 7th, 2014. During the festival, there will be a large gathering, public movement and many pavement stalls in Adugodi. This is likely to affect movement of traffic in and around Adugodi.Plan your travel for tomorrow well in advance to avoid getting caught in likely traffic jams.  The Adugodi traffic police will divert vehicular movement on Adugodi Main Road, in view of large crowds coverging on Muni Chinnappa School for the Rathasapthami festival and other religious rituals. Alternative routes:- Vehicles coming from Madivala…

  Are you an ugly Indian? Why is India so filthy? Why do we keep our homes clean and our streets dirty? Why can’t we do anything about this pathetic lack of public hygiene? Who is to blame for our lack of civic sense? Is it our corrupt politicians, our dysfunctional governments, or ‘the system’ ? Or is it us, the people? Is it time to admit that many of India’s problems are because we are all ugly Indians – that we, the people, are as much part of the problem – if not, the problem. It’s about our rooted…

BESCOM consumers need not worry about wrong billing anymore. BESCOM has noticed that customers sometimes receive electricity bills that show more units they have actually consumed. They have attritudes error or negligence in meter reading, to be the main reasons for  wrong billing. Now BESCOM is taking a step to put an end to such human errors, through a technology called Photo Billing. A BESCOM employee checks the meter reading. In Photo Billing, the meter reader will take photographs of the reading of units consumed, with a special inbuilt 3MP Camera that is given to him. The captured images, will…

Come 8 and 9 February, Bangalore will play host to Neralu, a citizen-led Urban Tree Festival. The first of its kind in the city, and probably in the country, Neralu will bring together ecologists, artists, researchers, technologists, homemakers, professionals, adults and children in dialogue, to celebrate the spirit of Bangalore, its rich natural heritage and its trees. The event promises to have something in store for everybody and will feature a multitude of visual and experiential activities; walks, workshops, story-telling sessions, art exhibitions, movie screenings, children's activities - there’s plenty to choose from. You can have a look at the event schedule here. …