Podcast: What makes citizen activism in Bengaluru unique

by May 21, 2020 Society
Bengaluru has a extraordinarily large number of citizen activists working to make the city more liveable. Listen to our podcast on how these groups evolved and what they've been doing.

In the concluding episode of our podcast series ‘Lessons from Bengaluru’, we explore how Bengaluru came to have a unique, vibrant citizen activism scene. While activism was a preserve of the few earlier, this changed since the 2000s as the city started facing more challenges. And now we have citizen activists holding authorities accountable on anything from infrastructure projects like steel flyover, to ward-level governance.

Pravir Bagrodia and Srinivas Alavilli from two citizen collectives – Whitefield Rising and Citizens for Bengaluru (CfB) respectively – discuss how their groups came into being and what they have been working on.

While these two groups came about more recently, activists like Vijayan Menon have been working on civic issues for much longer. He discusses how different sets of people started getting into civic activism and deploying varied methods including PILs.

Bengaluru’s citizen activists have shown that even a handful of them can make a difference. We leave you with a question – what are you going to do for your city?

Find the full podcast series here.

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About Grace Madigan

Grace Madigan was an intern from Seattle, Washington. You can follow her @grace_madigan19.
Read more by Grace Madigan

Comments:

  1. Sumantra Sarkar says:
    May 21, 2020 at 12:46 pm

    Hi, I am very much interested in any movement related to the city.
    Please let me know how can i be involved

    Reply

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