CITIZEN JOURNALISM

In India, a road accident happens every minute. Yes, you read that right, every single minute. Road accidents and India aren’t strangers. In fact, they are better acquainted than they should be. Sometime mid-July in Jamshedpur, Jharkhand six people were killed in two separate road accidents. Around the same time seven people died in five separate accidents in Gujarat. In Nashik, Maharashtra, five people were killed in two separate accidents in June. These are just a few instances from recent weeks of the thousands of road accidents that occur in India every year. Of course, since lockdown was enforced across…

Fountain Heights is a 187-flat apartment block, located in Lokhandwala Township, Kandivali East, in the Western Suburbs of North Mumbai. Like most residential complexes in our neighbourhood, we were totally dependent on municipal water to meet our daily requirement of approximately 140 kilo litres. The society has two borewells that were provided by the builder, but they provided no water during the summer and very little during the monsoon. With no alternative to municipal supply, buying water through water tankers was the only option left with us during times of water cuts. The costs were often exorbitant, given the high…

The novel coronavirus scare globally has eclipsed many other issues, but water scarcity and how it adds to the challenge of the COVID-19 fight is one that cannot be ignored at any cost. Easy and regular access to clean water and proper sanitation is one of the fundamental requirements to keep the disease at bay, but in many urban areas of India, lack of such access may also emerge as one of the biggest hurdles for people trying to stay safe and healthy.  And it is not just the metropolitan areas or the bigger cities that suffer from insufficient water…

[This article is part of the Bengaluru Moving series, in which citizens share their vision for BMTC post COVID. This series is pubished in collaboration with Radio Active's #BengaluruMoving campaign. In this first part of the series, a transport expert shares his ideas.] Before we look into ‘post-COVID’ Bengaluru, we need to look back at how our transport system was in pre-COVID Bengaluru. We were facing extreme growth in: Vehicular traffic (both in terms of number of vehicles and vehicle kilometers travelled) and congestion on city roadsTraffic accidents and fatalities, especially of vulnerable road users High levels of exhaust emissions including…

In a press meet held on July 8th, TN CM Edappadi K. Palaniswami hinted that a further extension of the lockdown which is set to end at the end of the month is unlikely. The chief minister said, “Extending lockdown will cause economic slowdown thereby putting onus on the public to adhere to safety norms to prevent the spread of COVID-19.” He further emphasised the need for self-regulation among the general public even as the state continued to clock a high number of cases daily.  The fact however is that the premise of self-regulation by the public assumes that all…

We often see people in apartment complexes and neighbourhood shops putting out a whole lot of food (or grains) for the birds - usually pigeons and crows are the recipients. Ask any of them why they feed the birds and the answers almost always point towards redemption - doing a good deed, reserving a place in heaven, overcoming personal difficulties and the like. Urban wild animals such as pigeons and crows are meant to fend for themselves! There is something called ‘natural selection’ which allows only for the fittest individuals to survive, getting rid of weak animals and those prone…

The National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) was announced in 2018 and the draft was accepted in 2019. The programme is designed to build institutional capacity and initiate studies to better understand the pollution load in cities.  122 cities from 20 states and 3 union territories were declared “non-attainment” cities, based on the observed particulate matter pollution trends from the national ambient monitoring program (NAMP).  These cities were required to submit action plans outlining how to achieve 20-30% reduction in the ambient PM 2.5 levels by 2024, when compared to 2017. As of May 2020, there are 102 approved action plans.…

The city’s Chief Resilience Officer Krishna Mohan was on a flight over Chennai when he glanced out of his window and saw that the many rooftops dotting the city were all barren and empty, devoid of any greenery. This sight was unlike many of the cities he had visited. The view was stuck in his mind for some time and became the catalyst for the creation of an urban rooftop garden project for Chennai, which holds immense potential for the improvement of green cover in Chennai. The Urban Horticulture Initiative Urban horticulture is one of the strongest examples of effective…

We are a regular Mumbaikar working-couple and spend a big part of our everyday life between work and commute. The rising levels of pollution we were experiencing in a mega-city like Mumbai always bothered us. Urban pollution, as well as the threat to contamination of natural resources, is a global problem, and in a developing country like ours, the municipal land-fills stand out on this front. We knew about the Deonar dumping ground fire in 2017 and the accompanying air pollution. This could have been avoided if, as a city, we knew how to better manage the volume of waste…

Nobel laureate Albert Einstein, who demonstrated extreme patience in his pioneering research, when questioned on his unconventional methodology had once replied, “What is right is not always popular and what is popular is not always right.” The reply came at a time when he was repeatedly failing in his attempt to establish convincingly the Theory of Relativity. Undeterred, he pursued and his discovery has been the trend setter for many other discoveries in classical physics. When the coronavirus pandemic first surfaced on 30th January, few expected it to really hit India. February remained subdued but in March, as the cases…