City: Mumbai

When I dial Dr Rahul Ghule's number for an interview, I expect the phone line to be busy. In fact, I am prepared for it. For the past four months, Dr Ghule has repeatedly tweeted his phone number urging anyone with COVID-19 or related ailments to get in touch. But Dr Ghule answers immediately. “Most people WhatsApp me,” he says.  Dr Ghule is the Founder and CEO of 1Rupee Clinic which has been running Emergency Medical Rooms across railway stations in Mumbai since 2017. The doctors at these rooms or clinics offer checkup and out-patient department services and charge one…

When I made my 2020 planner on the first day of this year, I marked important academic and professional dates for the next six months. The first of these was my university graduation due in the month of March. We are now in September and the aforementioned graduation still seems a far mile away. To be fair, nothing about this year has been normal. With the coronavirus setting in from early March and a nationwide lockdown being declared from the end of that month, we’ve lived a life that is completely different from anything we might have experienced before. As…

The story of Kekee Manzil — The House of Art is the story of Mumbai’s Parsis, looked at through the life of one iconic person. The documentary film takes us through the life of the late Kekoo Gandhy (1920–2012), the famous art gallerist and picture frame manufacturer who was the owner of the popular Chemould Frames shop at Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda neighbourhood. But the film is also a nostalgic visual journey of Bombay in the 1980s and 1990s, which charts the history of the Parsi community in parallel. The filmmaker Behroz Gandhy, Kekoo’s daughter, has sketched his life through her…

Nirmohi Kathrecha, a graduate from the School of Environment and Architecture (SEA), is concerned about Mumbai's outfall levels - points where the city's drains or sewers empty into the Arabian Sea. The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) predicts a sea-level rise of 0.5 metres by 2051. “This means that Mumbai's outfall points will be below the sea level or the high-tide line,” Kathrecha says. “A backflow of water from the sea could submerge us.” The information is alarming. Kathrecha grew up in Mumbai’s Gorai region where torrential rain and flooding is routine. But solutions for flood mitigation, critical due…

On August 27, a portion of a three-storied building collapsed in Nagpada. Two people, including a 12-year-old girl, were killed. The building was dilapidated and had long standing plans to be redeveloped. Despite the collapse, residents refused to vacate the building. “They kept saying that our part of the building is fine and we will continue to stay here. They didn’t want to shift to transit camps in distant suburbs. The fire brigade and the civic authorities had to disconnect their water and electricity connections to get them to vacate their building,” said Amin Patel, local legislator from Mumbadevi constituency,…

In 2018, 30,000 slum dwellers from the Tansa pipeline area and those affected due to the Brihanmumbai Stormwater Disposal System project were moved to Mahul, an industrially polluted area in the east of Mumbai. After uninterrupted citizen protests from August 2018 to September 2019, the High Court ordered the Maharashtra Government to rehabilitate residents or pay them Rs 15,000 monthly rent and Rs 45,000 deposit to find accommodation elsewhere. For a city known for incomplete or uninhabitable slum-redevelopment projects, this sounded like an interesting move. If implemented, it wouldn’t have been different from the model of “housing choice vouchers” where…

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…