City: Mumbai

In September 2022, a lawyer, while traveling to work, was molested inside a local train. She shared her ordeal on Twitter, in a detailed thread that outlined not only the incident but her experience as she tried to report it to the police immediately after the incident. At the time of posting, police negligence towards her case pushed her to take to social media. Earlier in 2022, police data revealed that there was a sharp rise in sexual assault cases in the city in the last five years. Crime against women rose from 1,194 (reported) cases in 2017 to 1,541…

For the last ten years, Sunita Sutar has been looking after the well-being of slum dwellers near Bandra (West) railway station. From September 26th to October 12th, Sutar and nearly 4,000 Community Health Workers (CHW) like her were on the ground conducting door-to-door tuberculosis and leprosy survey for the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's (BMC) health department. The survey is part of India’s plan to eliminate TB and leprosy by 2025 and 2030 respectively. It covered over 49 lakh people in 9 lakh houses across 24 wards under BMC. "When this area was initially assigned to me, it was difficult to navigate.…

Art exhibition on Mumbai's monsoon Making a comeback after 16 years, the month-long Monsoon Festival has landed in Mumbai this year. The art exhibition is currently on show at two venues: at Method Bandra till October 16th, and the Tao Art gallery in Worli till October 23rd. Chock-full of art in diverse mediums, from paintings, drawings, photographs, to poetry, sculpture and vintage prints, the festival depicts the 'love-hate' relationship Mumbai has with the season. It attempts to capture the lived but un-documented aspects of the downpour, the relief and distress it brings, and the home-grown culture around it. The exhibition…

As we gear up to celebrate Diwali, stalls selling firecrackers crop up across the country, homes are cleaned and new clothes are bought. We see round-the-clock advertisements for clothes, jewellery, gadgets, sweets and other food products with attractive offers. Little thought is spared for waste generated in the production, packaging and disposal of all the products we buy during festivals. Burnt firecrackers, huge garbage bags filled with disposable cutlery, packaging from gift boxes are a common sight after festival days. Ever increasing waste and pollution levels We grow up reading about the disastrous impact of firecrackers on the environment and our…

I live in Kranti Nagar, Kandivali, at the base of a hill in an informal settlement. Our homes are made of tin sheets and we have received everything from water supply to electricity, but after a long struggle. Heavy rainfall coupled with a poor sewage system has made the monsoons unbearable. The water cannot flow into the gutters as they are choked to the brim with waste, causing them to overflow and the water to collect entering our homes after a round of heavy showers. Our roads are not concretised or tarred and our homes are makeshift shelters or incrementally…

Land is scarce in Mumbai. The island city to the south, an island only in name, is surrounded by the sea on all but one side. Towards the north, it is bordered by the neighbouring city of Thane. With such space constraints, to accommodate a population of 12 million, there is only one-way housing can go, and that is up.  How much housing can be built is thus less determined by land than by the amount of floor space, multiplied when the number of floors in a building reaches greater heights. This is controlled by the Floor Space Index, or FSI,…

In 2019, Mehndi and Pooja, as part of their low waste journey from the हम Prithvi से, a social enterprise, visited a doctor practising near the Deonar dumping ground in Govandi. While it was known that the lives of people living around the dumping ground are poor, what they heard was quite heartbreaking. The doctor had been practising there for over a decade. He mentioned that he observed a rise in cases related to air pollution in the past few years. The reason is the rising quantity of dumped waste around and the toxic fumes from the hazardous waste especially after being…

One mohalla clinic opens under 'Mission Healthy Dharavi', 12 more to come The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) opened one mohalla clinic at T-Junction this week under 'Mission Healthy Dharavi' initiative. The civic body plans to open 12 more of such portable clinics in Mumbai and will keep them operational from 3 pm to 10 pm. The initiative aims to provide access to primary healthcare to working class population by ensuring the clinics are functional when they get home from work. The portable clinics will be easy to dismantle and can be carried around to avoid congestion in the area. Source:…

37-year-old Nitin has been a tobacco user for more than 10 years. Last month, he was swinging between life and death in Parel’s King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital after suffering from a heart attack. “I was experiencing pain in my chest, I was unable to breathe. They performed CPR when I reached KEM. I underwent angioplasty and was admitted for a week,” says Nitin, who works as a private driver in Mumbai. The city witnessed a jump in heart-attack cases in the first six months of 2021 as a total of 17,880 lost their lives to it. Nearly 3,000 died every month; in…

“It was 12:05 in the night. Some people were awake, some were asleep,” says Rafiq Shaikh, recounting the landslide that struck Kurar Village in Malad on July 2nd, 2019, killing 32 of his neighbours and washing all their houses away. “It was raining heavily and water had entered our house, so we were awake. Perhaps that’s the only reason we made it out alive,” he says. The retaining wall of the Malad Hill water reservoir, towering over their houses in Pimpri Pada and Ambedkar Nagar in Kurar Village, collapsed under the pressure of 300 mm of continuous rainfall. It was like a…