Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation

Shakuntala (61) is a domestic worker in Mumbai's Lower Parel where she takes up jobs in and around the area and travels in BEST buses. On the rare days when she cannot afford the tedious task of waiting at a bus stop, she chooses the luxury of a kaali peeli taxi. Shakuntala was surprised to find out that the city's traffic police are now imposing fines of Rs 200 if all the passengers in a car fail to wear a seatbelt. "I travel short distances, my commute is limited from home to work and back I don't know about all of this," she…

A raft of proposals for the beautification of Mumbai was announced recently amid well-orchestrated publicity. The project which is estimated to cost Rs 1700 crore is slated to be completed by March 2023. Neighbouring Thane will be forking out Rs 100 crore for a similar beautification project. The "Mumbai Beautification Plan" includes beautification of road dividers, improvement of footpaths, installation of street furniture and street lights, the beautification of traffic islands, optimum usage of public spaces underneath bridges, maintenance of toilets and creation of wall paintings and murals. Even the most politically naïve citizen will refuse to believe that these…

A comprehensive parking policy in the works The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) claims it has completed drafting a parking policy for the Mumbai Parking Authority (MPA), which would be legally authorised to fine illegal parking. It will go live on a pilot basis early next year in the wards: D (Malabar Hill, Nepean Sea Road), G-South (Worli), K-West (Andheri west) and S (Powai, Bhandup). The civic body has been under deadline after the High Court ordered parking spaces be designated in the city. While all NOCs have been acquired, the digital platform and a centralised data system is yet to…

Mumbai taxi drivers asked to put a rooftop indicator Mumbai's kaali-peeli (black and yellow taxi) drivers, by March 31st, 2023, will have to put an indicator on its rooftop that tells passengers if it is vacant, hired or the driver wants to take a break. The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Transport Authority (MMRTA) has made it mandatory for all taxis in the city to install this colour-coded indicator before the deadline. The indicator will have green, red and white-coloured LED lights with writings in English and Marathi. Red will indicate that the vehicle is hired, green will signal if it is…

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) began the demolition of illegal structures inside the 800-year-old Mahim fort on October 13th to begin restoration work. However, not all of the 267 families are happy about the decision of the civic body to rehabilitate them to Malad or Kurla. Many believe leaving the G/North ward, under which Mahim fort falls, would deprive them of their livelihoods and make access to schools difficult for their children. 38-year-old Samir Sheikh, who has been living in the area all his life, points at a demolished house inside the Mahim fort and says his family lived there…

For the last ten years, Sunita Sutar has been looking after the well-being of slum dwellers near Bandra (West) railway station. From September 26th to October 12th, Sutar and nearly 4,000 Community Health Workers (CHW) like her were on the ground conducting door-to-door tuberculosis and leprosy survey for the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's (BMC) health department. The survey is part of India’s plan to eliminate TB and leprosy by 2025 and 2030 respectively. It covered over 49 lakh people in 9 lakh houses across 24 wards under BMC. "When this area was initially assigned to me, it was difficult to navigate.…

March 10 2022, is the date that Priya, 16, and her mother Laxmi, 39, will remember for the rest of their lives. On that date, Priya's father Annadurai, 50, lost his life while working in Mumbai's Kandivali area. He was one of three men employed for manual scavenging, a practice that removes human excreta by hand from sewers or septic tanks. This work was supposed to pay each of them Rs 500. Annadurai was a sanitation worker under private contractors. He was hired for work at Kandivali along with his three friends - Rauf Syed, Krishnamurti and Ganpati. With no…

Are you a Mumbaikar practising waste segregation by separating your waste into dry and wet waste? Perhaps you even go a step ahead and dutifully put aside your sanitary, hazardous and e-waste. You might have made it a habit of handing over the compartmentalised waste to the housekeeping staff of your housing society every morning like clockwork. But what happens after you shut the door? While your wet waste continues on towards its intended destination, the landfill, does your segregated dry waste successfully make it to recycling? Taking plastic as an indicator, 59%  of plastic waste generated in Maharashtra is diverted…

An idea first introduced by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) in 2018 is now bearing fruit. The Society for Mumbai Incubation Lab to Entrepreneurship (SMILE) Council was announced as the BMC's business incubation centre, inviting start-ups and entrepreneurs with unique ideas to Mumbai's problems.  Four years on, the SMILE council has resulted in four innovative medical technology products about to begin use in BMC hospitals. Three others are in the pipeline, the latest being four mini-sewage treatment plants (STP) for slum clusters along the coast, whose usual outlet into the sea has been blocked by the Coastal Road Project. Decentralised and environment-friendly,…

The years 2013 and 2014 stand out in the State of Health report for Mumbai released by Praja Foundation. With a discrepancy of over thousands of deaths in those years in the age group of 0 to 4 for diseases such as hypertension, diabetes and tuberculosis, the data raises more questions than answers. Collected from all the 24 wards under Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) through RTIs up until 2015, the data shows strange figures for the cause of death among various age groups. For instance, the data shows that in 2013, 1,612 children in the age group of 0 to 4 died…