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“When travelling by the local train, sometimes we hear loud and long train horns followed by an announcement stating - on duty stretcher personnel please report to the station master's office - this indicates that something unpleasant has happened and the injured will be attended by the concerned trained railway staff,” says Vidya K, a regular commuter of the Mumbai local trains. The bustling railway platforms of the Mumbai suburban railway system bear witness to numerous incidents of medical emergencies. With a vast number of commuters using the local train network, some or the other health crises are common on…

For the past three years, Anjana’s family of seven has had only one earning member. Anjana and her father, both workers at India United No. 5, a National Textile Corporation (NTC) mill in Mumbai, have been without work ever since the mills closed down during the COVID pandemic. Her brother works at a vegetable store. Expectedly, the income is not sufficient to run the household. “I dropped out after class 9 and started working at the mill in 2019 because the family needed more income. Once COVID happened, the mill closed down. We got full salaries for two to three…

Ganganna (name changed) has been working as a manual scavenger, cleaning toilets and drains for the past 25 years in Tumkur. He says that most villagers have almost stopped hiring manual scavengers, but in urban areas like Bengaluru, there is demand for people like him. Cleaning of STPs cause of death Bengaluru has a large number of Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs), mostly in apartments, and many lack mechanised maintenance. When STPs require manual intervention in repairing blocks and cleaning, it is workers like Ganganna who are called to get into the sewage pits. This has led to the institutionalisation of…

It has been just over a month. The incident at an educational institute in NOIDA where a young boy killed his girlfriend, and then killed himself, sent shockwaves through the city. Unfortunately, this is no isolated case. Deaths by suicide or criminal acts involving young adults are being reported with alarming frequency. Incidents like the NOIDA one is just another stark reminder of the grave mental health issues among a high proportion of our adolescent and youth population. Especially post-COVID. It is by now well known that certain behavioural trends among children are tell-tale signs of underlying mental health issues…

Gangaram Hivrale has been making trips to the ward office to ask about the “promised” rehabilitation. However, he is yet to get a positive response. It’s been six years since his family was evicted. In 2017, the Bombay High Court had ordered removal of houses for the security of Tansa Pipeline and also ordered rehabilitation based on the 2000 cutoff date for informal housing.  “Every time we go to the ward office to ask about our status of Annexure-2 finalization, we are told there are no houses available in the city. We have all the documents yet, we have to…

“I had sleepless nights for months, even now when I recall those days, I feel uneasy,” says Neelam Lilaramani, a senior citizen residing in Goregaon - a suburb of Mumbai. Last year, as she was scrolling through her Facebook app, she stumbled upon an advertisement for a dress that she liked. She added her address, checked for payment details, and chose the ‘cash on delivery’ option to avoid any unwanted online scams - and then clicked ‘buy’. A few days later, when the parcel arrived, she wasn't at home. On his third attempt, the delivery person handed the parcel, Neelam…

Kavitha and Jyothi are domestic workers from Tamil Nadu who have been living in North Bengaluru for two decades, raised families here, and speak Kannada fluently. However, only Jyothi can access the free bus scheme. Kavitha doesn’t have an Aadhar card with a Karnataka address. The Congress government’s free bus scheme, Shakti, is highly popular and has been lauded across the media. But the benefits of the scheme will not reach all women. Migrant women in the state who are not domiciled, will be left out of it. Free bus travel has opened up the city for women, say activists.…

Ramalingam*, a sexagenarian, was travelling alone from Madurai to Chennai on a Sunday morning and reached the Egmore railway station. As he was walking on the foot-over-bridge to take the metro rail, he went into a sudden cardiac arrest. While the public tried to help him and dial 108 ambulance service, not many were aware of the emergency medical centre inside the station's premises that is exclusively meant for attending to medical emergency cases in Chennai Egmore railway station. A railway staff noticed the crowd and intimated the medical staff at the centre. A female and a male nurse immediately…

For Sowndharya Gopi, a trans person who grew up in the housing unit of the Tamil Nadu Urban Habitat Development Board (TNUHDB) in Royapuram, those tenements constituted the centre of her life.  "I have faced discrimination for being a trans person all my life but the people in those housing units, who were my kith and kin, were the first among the few people who accepted me for who I am," says Sowndharya. Recalling the days of her family moving from the thatched huts to the housing unit, Sowndharya says that as many as 240 families living in the nearby…

On June 11th, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah boarded a BMTC bus, turned conductor for a few minutes, and issued the first free tickets to women passengers as part of the Shakti scheme. Free bus travel is one of the five guarantees of the newly formed Congress government and the first to be fulfilled. While the scheme has been appreciated by many women, several issues need to be resolved to sustain it in the long term, according to public transport advocates. Launch of the Shakti scheme. Pic: Twitter/BMTC_Bengaluru Bengaluru Bus Prayanikara Vedike (BBPV), a group lobbying for better bus service in the…