City: Bengaluru

“I never got any benefits from my contractors when I was working on my own but from the time I am working for LabourNet, I have my health insurance and was even paid when an accident happened a few months back. All my friends here are benefiting from LabourNet,” explains Suresh who is working all day at a construction site near the Tin Factory, KR Puram. He rests on a boulder to talk, wiping sweat off his forehead with his hands full of cement dust. Bengaluru-based LabourNet provides access to information about jobs and labour to construction workers and clients,…

I have run a full marathon and a couple of half marathons but I never really enjoyed running. I did it more as a chore, somewhat like eating healthy food and doing laundry. That is until I started running with Asha, an NGO working on children's education in Bangalore. Initially it started with a curiosity as to what drove Santhosh Padmanabhan, an Asha volunteer and marathon runner in Bangalore to do a 24 hour/156 km non-stop run. I learnt that it was a fund raising activity for education related causes. Padmanabhan, a software engineer, spends innumerable hours in education related…

Theatre has always been a media that awed me. The whole idea of performing live is fascinating and challenging. I have been attending plays for a long time, but being part of a theatre crew was a totally different experience. I got an opportunity to be a part of the production team for Evam’s “An Idiot for dinner” that was recently staged at Rangashankara on the 12th, 13th and the 14th of June. A stage adaptation of the Hindi movie, Bheja Fry, which is based on the French play Le dîner de cons. Sanjay and his friends have a tradition…

On 25 June 2007, the erstwhile Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy handpicked the new Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) Commissioner, S Subramanya. Circa 2009. Unable to trace the body of a 6-year-old who apparently fell into a storm water drain and a defamation case against Lok Ayukta Santhosh Hegde, Subramanya gets transferred, apparently after causing much embarrassment to the BJP government. Is it justified to hold Subramanya responsible for the death of Abhishek? Should he have done the work of a drain inspector? Was the transfer an answer to the problems of the public? Citizen Matters has also received claims…

Of late, Bangalore has too many parks. An area like Yelahnaka has more than 30 parks. Though parks look good, they are not planned properly. Parks enhance the beauty of the layout and increase its value, but deprive the children of playgrounds. Where should children go for playing?Today some schools do not have playgrounds. Grounds have been converted to green deserts. No one can enter the parks between 10 AM and 4 PM. What is the big idea of having parks like these? We need trees for generating oxygen and each of these parks can still have walking paths with…

Is it a memoir or another book depicting the glory of old Mysore? Is it about the politics and administration of the kingdom of Mysore? It is hard to categorise MA Sreenivasan’s ‘The Last Mysore Pradhan’. I presumed it would be the author’s autobiography when I had started reading it. But the book had much more to offer.Sreenivasan started his career as a young Mysore Civil Service (M.C.S) officer in 1918. He served as with both Mysore Kingdom and then the Government of British India. He was made a minister (pradhan) in 1943. In 1947, he was invited by the…

How many of you did not get to vote in the Lok Sabha elections because you couldn’t find your name in the electoral list? While many people scrambled to register their names, a factory found itself in the list with its gender and father's name specified. Pramod Goni a social worker who lives near the factory, says Printflex factory was registered under the electoral list of Constituency No 151 and Polling Part No 239 in Nagappa Reddy and Kushal (NRK) Layout in Mahadevapura. The factory is located on Nagappa Reddy Layout Main Road. The electoral officer listed ‘Printflex’ as the…

Gautam B Pandit and his family were very excited last Wednesday after the heavy downpour in the city. The rain filled up the 5000 litre barrel they have set up in their house for rainwater harvesting (RWH). “We could have filled another two barrels that night. The barrel just overflowed”, Gautam says. The Pandits have just installed RWH at their home on Hayes Road in Richmond Town. The 40 houses in Sherwood Apartments, located on Kaggadasapura Main Road in CV Raman Nagar, have not faced any water problem for the past four months. All thanks to RWH says the residents.…

Bangalore witnessed the first event of its kind in India on the 14th of June, a duathlon! Runners for Life (RFL), an organisation dedicated to runners and running, partnered with Ride a Cycle foundation, a non-profit organization which encourages cycling as a form of recreation, sport and a means to commute to work. A duathlon is an athletic event that consists of a running leg, followed by a cycling leg and then another running leg. First leg of the duathlon (pic: DS) Many of the city’s seasoned as well as first time runners along with cyclists were gathered at the…

Dinesh Gundu Rao (Congress) was first given an MLA ticket in 1999. He won from the Gandhinagar constituency and has won for three times now from the same constituency. Dinesh Gundu Rao Rao did his schooling from Bishop Cottons in Bangalore. He graduated in Electronics and Communication from BMS College of Engineering in 1992. He ran a computer training centre with a few others for some time after graduation while simultaneously participating in Congress party activities.  Click here for the complete profile. I called Rao on his mobile. He asked me to come to his office where I landed the…