City: Mumbai

The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report of 2019 indicates that every day, 35 people die due to fire accidents in India, with over half being home fires. Fires in high rises are not very common, but they almost always make it to the media headlines because of the damage they cause. Fire safety in apartment complexes is usually not on the list of priorities of either the builder or the flat owners. This is because fire safety systems do not impact our day-to-day lives, unlike water pipes, lifts, lighting, landscaping, garbage, drainage, etc. When a fire breaks out beyond…

Waterlogging in Mumbai is an annual affair, met with cynicism and apathy. The city’s insufficient drainage system, unsustainable urbanisation, reduction of green cover and natural barriers are enlisted among the top reasons for the floods.  But this information is often too dense or inadequate to understand why citizens can’t spend one monsoon without wading through (and living in) murky rainwater mixed with sewage and solid waste. Citizen Matters explains:   Let’s begin with the topography of the city. Welded together through land reclamation, the city is shaped like a saucer. It has low lines of hills on either sides: Malabar Hill…

Yesterday, I told you how I managed to learn solid waste management techniques from one of the pioneers in the industry. The two-day training I attended with Mr Srinivasan, a relentless advocate of efficient waste management, helped our township walk down the path of implementing those techniques. Mr Srinivasan is the Apex Monitoring Committee Special Invitee to National Green Tribunal (NGT), New Delhi and a resource person from Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India, that is implementing the Swachh Bharat Mission. On request, he made a visit to our Lokhandwala Township in Kandivali East in September 2019.…

Mumbai generates about 11,000 tonnes of solid waste every day, according to estimates from Central Pollution Control Board, 2015-16. The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) is formally responsible for its management.  The unexpected entry of COVID-19, has pushed solid waste management to the background. While the focus is on minimising the spread of the virus and saving lives at this time, we cannot ignore the waste that we are continuing to increasingly generate due to the pandemic. In order for us to leave a better planet to the future generation, we have to roll up our sleeves and get our hands…

“If nothing ever changed, there’d be no butterflies.” - Unknown Everyone learns about the life cycle of the butterfly right in primary school. Incredible isn’t it? – how it metamorphoses from a crawly caterpillar into a beautiful fluttery creature. With a short life cycle of about 30 days, it responds quickly to climatic and habitat changes, and therefore the presence of butterflies is increasingly being used as an environmental indicator. Butterflies are useful pollinators, and there are several plants that rely on them to propagate. There are about 20,000 species of butterflies in the world, and 1,400 of these are…

This is the fourth story in a multi-part series on the pandemic and its impact on people in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, YUVA, a non-profit organisation, attempts to understand the challenges they face in accessing relief and assesses the rights-based approach to benefits. Rajit, a 57-year-old construction worker is finding it hard to make ends meet after the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown hit. "I have not been able to work for a day since the March lockdown," he says. The official figures on the number of construction workers in Mumbai are pegged to around 6 lakhs, making them 2%…

In the many years that I have lived in Mumbai, I have perfected a method of walking from the Western Express Highway metro station in Andheri East to my apartment, a kilometre away.  First, I sprint to cross the road. Then I use the momentum to jump onto a footpath. A little ahead, 90% of the footpath is encroached by a shop. So I turn to my right, extend my arms, and maintain balance as if the footpath were a surfing board. Then I leap over a variety of automobile parts displayed by the shopkeepers in the shopfront. Like me,…

Like everything else, COVID-19 took the sheen off Maximum City during Ganesh Chaturthi as well. Celebrations, laughter and songs would have been in the air, if not for the lockdown.In Mumbai, usually the festivities go on for 11 days, when roads are blocked by massive pandals, music blares through loud speakers and groups of people dance their way to the beaches to immerse the elephant-headed God. Well before the festival, the government issued standard operating procedures, aiming to avoid crowds and the spread of the virus. They restricted the height of large idols that are generally housed in community pandals,…

This is the third story in a multi-part series on the pandemic and its impact on people in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, YUVA, a non-profit organisation, attempts to understand the challenges they face in accessing relief and assesses the rights-based approach to benefits. The COVID-19-induced lockdown disproportionately impacted the lives of women and other minority genders. In a pre-pandemic world these communities were already disadvantaged, with lesser space for expression, deeper struggles in accessing jobs, more vulnerability to abuse and often shouldering a larger burden of household duties and care needs.  The pandemic deepened these schisms.  Nazar is a trans-woman…

By end the of May, Rehana Shaikh, 39, a Naik with Mumbai police, developed a fever. Shaikh had been overseeing bandobast across Mumbai from Dadar's Naigaon police station. Every day, from the beginning of the nationwide lockdown on March 24, she was allocating duties to 278 policewomen across the city's emerging hotspots, arterial roads, hospitals, and check nakas. When COVID-19 symptoms manifested, Shaikh rushed to Metropolis Labs, a private diagnostic centre, for a test. But the result was delayed. "My symptoms were worsening but without a test result, no hospital or a COVID health care centre would admit me," she…