City: Mumbai

Between April 9th and September 8th, this monsoon, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) filled 31,398 potholes in the city, measuring 1,56,910 sq.m, with 2,696 metric tonnes of bitumen cold mix. The expenditure for this was roughly Rs forty-eight crores.  However, every year, all 24 administrative wards in Mumbai are allotted only Rs two crores each for tending to potholes that emerge every monsoon. Of these, while Rs 1.5 crores is meant for preventing potholes, the rest - Rs 50 lakh - is meant for filling potholes that have become a repetitive problem in the city.  The BMC had set up…

The Mumbai Climate Action Plan (MCAP) is due to be implemented by the end of this year. A joint effort of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), the Government of Maharashtra and WRI India, the draft version will be showcased at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 26) in November. The general public was invited to give  feedback and suggestions till September 20th. The plan is to work in two ways. The first - mitigation - will concentrate on the sectors of energy and buildings, sustainable mobility and waste management, chosen for their significant contribution to greenhouse…

Sushant Jare, a gas cylinder delivery worker in Goregaon, Mumbai, was bedridden in late July for two weeks due to a severely pulled muscle (tendinitis). That is a consequence of his job - lifting gas cylinders, which are about 30 kilos, often over several floors.  “I joined the  gas agency about three months ago, when I left my village to come to the city in hopes of earning a better living to support my newborn child. I dropped out of school in 9th grade, so I couldn’t get any office job, hence I had to resort to physical labour” he…

In the early hours of 10th September, a tempo driver named Mohan Chauhan killed a 32-year-old Dalit woman in Sakinaka. The woman was found severely injured, bleeding in a tempo and was immediately hospitalised, after a First Information Report (FIR) was registered. CCTV footage recovered by the police found that the accused had raped and assaulted the woman with an unknown object. He was then booked for rape, and after she succumbed to her injuries, a murder charge was added to the FIR. The police allegedly recovered evidence that the two knew each other prior to the incident.  Additionally, on…

Schools, colleges to reopen from October 4 Mumbai Mayor Kishori Pednekar has issued strict guidelines for the city's schools which are set to open for Grade 8 - 12 on October 4. The guidelines included mandates such as contact sports are disallowed, all schools and colleges have to be connected with nearby Covid centres, follow one seat for one student policy, and have 50 students capacity per class. What the SOPs are missing, as some experts point out, is how underfunded civic schools will be supported by the BMC to carry out some of these procedures. According to a Citizen…

Naresh Chandra Singh, 46, is a native of Kharghar who hails from Manipur in the Northeast of India. A childhood endowed with nature allowed him a natural passion for the environment and its preservation. A job in American IT consulting firm Gartner led him to set up a base in Kharghar, which introduced him to the vast natural landscape of the district and Navi Mumbai as a whole. The slow degradation of nature in Navi Mumbai in the context of rapid urbanisation has compelled him to fight for the precious biodiversity that surrounds and sustains the area. In 2018, he…

As fears towards an impending third wave – set to reveal itself in October according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) – have set in the city, there is a deeper concern among parents of young children who are yet to be vaccinated. To ensure the safety of their wards, many parents have restricted their children from playing in common premises where they would normally interact with other children.  On September 13, only ten children were admitted in Mumbai hospitals (nine in the NESCO COVID-19 care facility and one in Seven Hills Hospital) with moderate or severe symptoms of the…

In 2010, journalist and activist Saumya Roy co-founded a non-profit organization called Vandana Foundation to support the livelihoods of Mumbai’s poorest micro-entrepreneurs by giving small, low-interest loans. By 2013, she started getting requests for loans from waste-pickers in Deonar. This year, she is out with a book about their lives, titled Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings, published by Profile Books. How it all began Saumya decided to write about the community of waste-pickers in 2016 when a fire began raging in the Deonar dumping grounds, however, her interest in the community was established in…

Mumbai schools to reopen post Diwali? At the last Pediatric Task Force meeting that local corporations should take the final decision of reopening schools in their areas. However, Mumbai mayor Kishori Pednekar on September 23rd, said that the decision of re-opening of schools in Mumbai and surrounding areas will be taken after Diwali BMC Education Officer, Raju Tadvi was quoted as stating that they are "preparing a plan for safe reopening, which will be given to all schools in the city, irrespective of which board they are affiliated to.” Under this plan, schools will be required to have a medical…

I knew of the Baobab tree as a massive tree somewhere in Africa, but little did I know that for most of my life in Bombay, I had been living among these gentle giants. Both the colleges that I studied in had a Baobab tree within 300 meters, but I never noticed them.  "If a Baobab spoke, man wouldn't understand!" This phrase displays the profound nature of the trees and their existence that has surpassed centuries.Pic: Zico Fernandes Originally from Madagascar, Africa, the Baobab trees are defined by their swollen base - with a girth upto 36 ft - and height…