CITIZEN JOURNALISM

With rising temperatures, unpredictable rainfall and extreme weather patterns becoming the norm over the last two decades, climate change has emerged as the single greatest threat to our species' survival on our planet. In the coming decade, called the #GenerationRestoration by the UN, several individuals and organisations will do their best to alleviate the climate change crisis. Amongst a range of actions out there, micro forests are emerging as one of the most popular, decentralised and effective ways to fight climate change. Micro forests, or Miyawaki forests, are small forests in urban settings. What differentiates them from other conventional landscapes…

Bengaluru is increasingly becoming a city with more roads and flyovers, and with less spaces for public interaction or informal encounters. As in other Indian cities, here too, administrators imagine a city that meets global standards of urban form and infrastructure. Whereas, at the neighbourhood level, people continue to nurture and sustain spaces like ashwath kattes (peepul tree shrines), informally generating community spaces. And these spaces - which assimilate the rural within the urban - survive even as government agencies have been rampantly usurping public spaces for various projects. There are two competing processes in city-making – one, from above,…

The recent spate of rains in Chennai has seen the city flooded in large parts. The current Chennai floods are all over social media now, stark in the photos of inundated streets and water logging in many homes, especially those on the ground floor. The chaos has evoked angry and anguished responses from residents. There has been a chorus of demands, asking why the city’s stormwater drain network was unable to handle the rains and how the city would hold up in the event of further downpours that are predicted. As part of a group of residents who suffered a…

Last year, controversy arose over the Karnataka government’s decision to create a ‘tree park’ in the 600 acre Turahalli Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Bengaluru. Protestors questioned the conversion of an existing forest into a ‘tree park’; asserting that the ‘tree park’ would resemble ‘horticulture parks’ with manicured lawns and ornamental plants and not real ‘forests’. The project was stopped temporarily. In mid-2021, walkers around the forest noticed signs of activity. Work on the ‘tree park’ had restarted without any consultations with citizen groups or locals. The forest department had built a park with statues of tigers, peacocks, bugs,…

[BBMP, in coordination with other government agencies, has initiated the K100 (Citizens’ Water Way) project to rejuvenate the stormwater drain network between Majestic and Bellandur lake. Mod Foundation, an urban action and research institute, has been working with these agencies to ensure the project’s goals are met, and is also facilitating the overall design concept. The author, who is part of the Mod Foundation, gives details of the project in this article.] There is growing awareness about the dire state of Bengaluru’s lakes, which has mobilised citizens, institutions and the government to take action. Storm water drains (SWDs) are a…

I am a resident of Dadar Parsi Colony in Mumbai with cerebral palsy. I’ve been using a motorised wheelchair for the past two years. Before that, I used elbow crutches, but a nerve compression in my spine forced me to make the shift to a wheelchair. While a wheelchair could mean more independence to move around, I quickly realised that most of Mumbai’s roads were not accessible to me. The dangerous conditions of road travel in the city made it difficult for me to do basic chores like going to the grocery store, chemist, bank, or visit public spaces recreationally.  My…

In November 2019, the erstwhile chief minister of Tamil Nadu inaugurated a pedestrian plaza in T Nagar’s shopping area of Pondy Bazaar with much fanfare and promise. The project, under the Chennai Smart City Mission, was designed to give priority to pedestrians over the rush of vehicles that usually dominated the streets. Along with this came the promise of clean streets and better parking facilities. Of course, it also implied that there would be no inconvenience caused to the residents in surrounding areas. However, almost two years into the project, many issues which were initially thought of as teething troubles,…

After I swallowed the anchor (a naval term for retirement), I settled down with my wife and two kids in an independent house in a suburb of Bengaluru. I was thrust into managing one's own resource in terms of electricity, water and waste we generate unlike the days when the navy took care of all this. My home is designed to be capable of generating its own power with minimal need of utilising power from the grid, and taking care of its water needs through proper conservation techniques, also a cool home which is not energy guzzling. The principles that…

By March 2020, along with the rest of the country, Mumbai went into a severe lockdown. Social distancing, wearing a mask and hand washing were necessary precautions, and access to them, the need of the hour. A majority of the population did not - and still doesn’t - have access to safe water or sanitation, nor the privilege of technology.  This exclusion in the time of a public health crisis is not new. Bombay has seen several epidemics in the past, but what is often overlooked in the discourse on public health is that many such diseases are waterborne. Furthermore,…

Birds in India migrate from Northern latitudes to escape cold temperatures during winter. Some arrive during monsoons to breed and some are passage migrants that take a pit stop in the country around October-November and March-April, during their journeys elsewhere. Some are local migrants that move within the country according to their breeding cycle.  We should appreciate the long journeys which migratory birds take in order to complete their life cycle. In terms of migration routes of birds, Navi Mumbai lies near one of the paths of the Central Asian Flyway.  Starling, Buntings, Rosefinch, Stonechat and Pipits migrate to Mumbai…