City: Delhi / NCR

It literally took an international outcry to force the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to step in and try to find a solution to the rising mountain of waste that is East Delhi’s Ghazipur landfill. At a time when Swachh Bharat is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s focus and debates rage over climate change, the PMO has stepped in to seek help from experts to grapple with the challenge posed by the country’s tallest mountain of waste. On July 10th, it issued a 12-page Global Request for Proposal (RFP) for tackling this problem. An IIT Kanpur alumnus and  Principal Scientific Advisor to…

On June 18, 2019, the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority (NOIDA) sent a team of personnel and machinery to reclaim a 5-acre plot along the Dadri-Surajpur-Chalera (DSC) road in Sector 48 (Map 1 below). The plot, a part of the Barola village agricultural land, was acquired for developing NOIDA in 1976. The Authority claims that most landowners took compensation for the loss of their land. Since the official master plan of the city (NOIDA Master Plan 2031) shows the plot as a ‘green belt’, the marble market that sprouted there in early 2000s, alongside some old and new pucca residences,…

ON JUNE 18th, Upper Vaitarna, one of the few lakes that provide water to Mumbai, hit zero. Appeals of saving water trickled across the city and the Brihanmumbai Mumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) assured citizens that it would dip into its safety stock in other lakes. When monsoon finally arrived, it came with the decade’s highest 24-hour rainfall. Mumbai was flooded; trains, buses and flight services disrupted; and 32 people dead.   But no one was surprised. “It happens every year. A couple of days ago we barely had any water and now the city is waterlogged,” Prashant Patil, a resident of…

The balcony in Cultured, a cafe in Humayunpur, Delhi, gives a good vantage point of the daily happenings in the streets -- women walking the streets in their chic winter coats, men in trendy hairstyles going to office in their formal attire and people coming out to buy their daily groceries. On the same street one can see the local men of the village sitting in front of their houses with a hookah and a bonfire. Most of the young tenants in this urban village in Delhi are from the North Eastern states. As I sat in the cafe with…

It is almost as tall as the Qutb Minar and growing in height every day, threatening to grow taller than the Taj Mahal. It spews deadly methane gas into the atmosphere and pollutes ground water. It provides a risky and toxic living for ragpickers and is a major health hazard for all those living around it. It claimed two lives when a part of it collapsed in 2017, and poses a continuous fire hazard. And yes, it is causing changes in the climate of the city. This is the Ghazipur landfill in East Delhi, now represented in Parliament by former…

Air pollution is now the leading cause of death in India. It accounts for 1.2 million deaths, more than the number of people killed by malaria, smoking or road accidents. Last year, a study by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) found that Bengaluru topped the list of major polluting cities in India. More recently, measurements of pollution level using hand-held devices show that particulate matter pollution levels in many places in Bengaluru are substantially higher than the levels in Beijing, China and yes, even New Delhi.  More alarmingly, pollution levels in Bengaluru are expected to skyrocket over the next…

The newly elected Bharatiya Janata Party at the Centre has announced the launch of ‘Nal Se Jal’, a poll-promise from its 2019 manifesto, to ensure piped water to every household by 2024. How big is the task? In India, only 32% households have tap water supply from treated sources, as per Census 2011. 18 percent or 6,25,000 households in the capital city, home to the nation’s rich and influential, do not have piped water supply. Yet, this city has one of the highest percentages of households with piped water among India’s 35 states and union territories. Only seven of these…

28-year-old Kamlesh Kumar moved to Uttar Pradesh’s Noida from Patna eight years ago, in pursuit of a better life. Kumar is one among thousands of rickshaw pullers (rickshaw-wallahs), mostly in their mid-20s or early 30s, who moved to Noida in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), to try their luck and earn better wages and better standards of living than they could dream of in their home towns. Reality however has been less benevolent. Noida or Gautam Buddh Nagar’s rickshaw wallahs often find themselves constantly trying to juggle the hardships of rent, finding cheap food and getting affordable medical treatment.…

Kanika*, a 15-year-old girl, carries her two-year-old sister Alisha in her arms. The portions of her hands and arms visible outside her half-sleeved magenta kurta are full of abrasions. “I’ve shown it to the doctor many times and he’s given me medicine but it remains itchy,” she says. She attributes the itchiness to the purportedly contaminated water in her home of one and a half years, in Anand Parbat transit camp. Her move to this central Delhi neighbourhood -- five kilometres from her former home – was forced and put her out of school, Kanika recalls. “Alisha was an infant…

Dr. Harsh Vardhan represents Chandni Chowk in Delhi as a Member of Parliament besides being the incumbent minister at the Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and the Ministry of Earth Sciences in the BJP-led NDA government. His political journey started in 1992 when he was elected as member of Delhi State Assembly for the first time. He was contesting from the Krishna Nagar constituency. He has been re-elected from the same constituency four times - 1998, 2003, 2008 and 2013. He has been a minister at the Health Ministry, Law Ministry and Education…