City: Surat

“The idea for an emission trading system germinated after a team of the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) and J-PAL (Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab research centre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) came to Surat sometime in 2012”. This is Jitubhai Vakharia, president of the South Gujarat Textile Processors Association. “During a meeting with them, I realised we were wasting money on compliance with environmental laws under a corrupt inspector raj," he says. Jitubhai was recalling the days when some 300 dyeing and printing mills in Surat were notorious for vomiting noxious gases through their chimneys. Today, ten…

A deadly plague. A committed and determined municipal commissioner. An aware and active citizenry. That was the beginning, in 1994, of Surat’s remarkable 25 plus year journey: from being the country’s dirtiest city with zero basic infrastructure, to the second-best managed city with well-maintained civic infrastructure. “The biggest success of the then commissioner S R Rao was that he changed the mindset of an entire population” says textile industrialist, Indravadan Mahadevwala. “Till then, we had a municipal corporation only by name.” Surat citizens were always known to be the happy-go-lucky types. Its decentralised textile industry had prospered enough to profit…

They came. They saw. They left. The Central team that visited Gujarat on July 17-18th to assess the state’s response to the continuing surge in COVID-19 cases in Ahmedabad and Surat did just that, even as the Ahmedabad Medical Association (AMA), on July 17th, filed an SOS writ petition in the Gujarat High Court. The petition expressed serious concern over the low number of tests being conducted and on the state’s dilly-dallying on granting approval for more testing laboratories. The AMA also sought a direction that tests at the OPD level should be permitted. It was only on July 15th,…

The portents for a potential major fire disaster were visible all over Surat. Especially with the city’s woefully ill-equipped fire service. The fire tenders that reached the Takshashila Arcade on May 24 to put out the fire in a coaching class situated in the roof of the building, had ladders that could only go up to 35 metres. Many of the 22 teenagers who died in the fire that day lost their lives when they jumped off the roof in panic. The fire personnel did not even have nets to catch them. As irony would have it, the city corporation…

Hadu Bahera owns a ‘home’ for 12-hours every day. During this time, the 51-year-old loom worker inhabits a six-by-three-feet space in a dingy room on Ved Road in north Surat. His co-worker uses the same space for the other 12 hours – depending on their shifts, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. or the reverse. The occasional ‘holidays’ – when there is a power cut – are days to be dreaded. Nearly 60 workers must then fit into a 500-square feet room at Mahavir Mess, where Bahera is presently space-sharing. The summer months – when temperatures reach 40 degrees Celcius…

It was in 1997 that Bangalore city corporation issued the first municipal bond in India, backed by a state government guarantee. The next year, Ahmedabad issued bonds worth Rs 100 crore, without government guarantee. But the momentum didn’t pick up - bonds worth only about Rs 1500 cr have been issued overall since then, and there have been no issues in the more recent years. Last June, however, Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) became the first city to issue bonds after a long gap. Bonds worth Rs 200 cr were issue to fund PMC’s 24X7 water supply project. Then again, in…

The growth in the nation’s cities has been maddeningly slow. And it has not even been much, according to the fifth edition of Janaagraha’s Annual Survey of India’s City-Systems (ASICS) 2017. There has been some improvement in the quality of governance in 23 cities. Yet, this has come about at a frustrating snail’s pace. Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy (Janaagraha), a Bengaluru-based non-profit, has surveyed the quality of governance in 23 major cities in 20 states. The survey was based on 89 questions. Pune was the Number 1 grosser, scoring between 3.0 and 5.1 on 10 and topping the…

It’s been close to two years since the first 20 cities were selected under the much talked-about Smart Cities Mission (SCM) of the Government of India, but progress under the mission has been slow. Let us just look at the top five cities. Selected in January 2016, these cities - Bhubaneswar, Pune, Jaipur, Surat and Kochi - are supposed to complete the proposed projects under the SCM by 2021-22. But most of these cities appear to be lagging behind schedule, both in terms of the number of projects completed as well as the works under progress. Surat leads, with works…

Traffic congestion, waste management, economic inequality -- issues such as these have been bogging down Indian cities. But attempting piecemeal, inefficient solutions means that problems have only worsened. The ‘Smart Cities Mission’ (SCM) launched by Narendra Modi's government in 2015 aimed at tackling urban issues. The concept was to make cities smart - to do more with less, to use existing resources efficiently and to build on them. As per the SCM, cities should provide citizens essential infrastructure, decent quality of life, sustainable environment, and also apply smart solutions. Given the lofty objective, it is interesting to observe how the…

In late May 2017, a big shout out for waste segregation came from none other than the Indian Prime Minister when he announced the introduction of new litter bins for segregated waste in 4000 cities and towns on his monthly radio show, Mann ki Baat. A few days later, on June 5, World Environment Day, a source segregation campaign was launched amid much fanfare by the Minister of Urban Development Shri M Venkaiah Naidu in the National Capital Region as he flagged off segregated waste collection vehicles. However, not much stress on the actual realisation of segregation was noted in…