City: Mumbai

Broken footpaths, leaky taps, or uncollected garbage, life in Mumbai must come with a crash course in grievance redressal methods. But it's only easy to lodge complaints with BMC, not get them resolved. Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is good at taking citizen complaints. You can call BMC's 1916 helpline where an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) will direct you to an operator who will note your complaint. Or you can log on to the BMC website where "complaints" is an easy find on the menu. Choose your preferred language and fill an online complaint form selecting your complaint category from the…

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Sea Breeze CHS Ltd is one of the oldest and largest societies along the iconic Palm Beach Road, in Sector 16, Nerul. The Society comprises of 10 towers with 28 flats in each, making it a total of 280 flats, with about 1000 residents. (Pic: Sea Breeze CHS) In 2017, when the Swacch Bharat Misson began, Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation (NMMC) mandated all housing societies with more than 200 flats to do complete segregation of waste at source - into wet and dry waste, and total in-house wet waste management. The Managing Committee (MC) of the society decided to go full…

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When we were moving to Mumbai, one of the major relocation tasks was finding a suitable house to live in. Suitable as in proximity to children’s school and husband’s office, size, furnishing, rent, amenities, and the like… things people look for while choosing a house. We knew a few people who were already living in the area and they indicated that the most efficient way of going about this would be to approach one (or more) of the many real estate agents who had set up shop for people like us (and for owners who had bought the houses but…

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Few civic issues bring citizens together like Solid Waste Management (SWM). An important component of neighbourhood cleanliness and sanitation, SWM has formed the core of citizen-government partnership in Mumbai.  Repeated governments have tried to stir up citizen participation through SWM. In 1997, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) formalised the creation of citizen groups called Advanced Locality Management (ALM) in an attempt to involve citizens in neighbourhood cleanliness.  Most recently, Swachh Survekshan, part of the Swachh Bharat Mission, ranks cities across the country in categories of cleanliness and sanitation on four parameters, one of which is citizen feedback. The SBM guidelines…

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“The lockdown around me is making me feel lonely, and I don’t understand how to make myself feel better. I also want to help my parents in some way, but I don’t know how to do so…” Today, we find ourselves in a world which is more overwhelming, challenging and restricted than before. With the COVID-19 pandemic, physical health is on everyone’s mind, and mental health has become an inevitable casualty. Children from low-income communities of India are facing adversities that have long-term psychological, emotional and physical effects; situations have worsened causing economic and financial ramifications, leading to issues such…

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More than 2,500 people die and over 3,000 are injured annually in Mumbai's suburban network, considered the lifeline of India's commercial capital. Quoting figures from the Railway Police, the Economic Survey of Maharashtra 2019-20, reveals that in 2017, there were 3,014 deaths and 3,345 injuries, while in 2018, this number was 2,981 and 3,349, respectively. On a particularly deadly day, 18 July 2019, 18 people died - the maximum in a single day. These include 12 on Central Railway and 6 on Western Railways. The latest conundrum surrounding the location of the Metro 3 car depot needs to be viewed in this context. In this political tug of war, no matter…

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It is magic at the DPS Lake these days. Located near Palm Beach Road behind Delhi Public School, Nerul in Navi Mumbai, the lake is home to many different species of birds. At this time of the year, the flamingos stand out and they are there in thousands! Flamingo City. (Pic: Malcolm Stephens) (Pic: Malcolm Stephens) Greater and Lesser flamingos fly in to Mumbai every winter from Kutch, Gujarat and Sambar Lake, Rajasthan. They are also known to come from other countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. The winters are harsh there, and apart from the warmth, the shallow…

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About five years ago, Manoj Gopalkrishnan, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, heard about the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus or MERS-COV outbreak. He read news stories discussing the shortage of testing kits and wondered if pooling as a form of testing, where samples are mixed together in a batch and only tested further if the combined sample tests positive, could be used to accelerate testing. But back then, the idea only remained in his head. In early 2020 as COVID-19 virus raged across the world, Manoj saw that once again there was a shortage of…

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At Mumbai Votes, we spent the last year tracking and assessing the performance of MPs against the promises they made before election and during the first year (2019-20), of their five year term.  All of the six MPs made promises to expedite long pending redevelopment & rehabilitation of slums and old buildings. In a city with more than half its population living in slums, and several collapses of old buildings, it is reasonable to expect elected representatives to prioritise the issue of safe, affordable and dignified housing for all.  In this piece, I will assess their efforts to fulfil their…

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In a few of the English movies I have seen, I recall seeing London Black Cabs, in which a firm partition isolates the driver from the passengers, with a small window for communication. Even in the days of Sherlock Holmes and horse-drawn Hansom Cabs, we see that the passengers are separated from the driver - some sort of social distancing. So, the idea of social distancing in small public transport vehicles is not really new. A Hansom Cab with driver on the sets of a Sherlock Holmes film (Photo: By Andrew Dunn - English Wikipedia) In June, when the city…

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