EDITORS' PICK

Long queues of women and men waiting for their turn at the tanker; schools forced to shut down due to water shortage; companies asking employees to work from home and even patients in hospitals bearing the brunt of water  shortage -- these are not scenes from any dystopian novel or movie. This is the reality Chennai is living today. The situation gets worse by the day as the city finds itself in the grip of another spell of widespread and acute water shortage. The scarcity of water has seen the city’s main reservoirs run dry. Borewells are depleted and the…

The portents for a potential major fire disaster were visible all over Surat. Especially with the city’s woefully ill-equipped fire service. The fire tenders that reached the Takshashila Arcade on May 24 to put out the fire in a coaching class situated in the roof of the building, had ladders that could only go up to 35 metres. Many of the 22 teenagers who died in the fire that day lost their lives when they jumped off the roof in panic. The fire personnel did not even have nets to catch them. As irony would have it, the city corporation…

When Ashish Prasad, technical lead at a bootstrapped IT startup, quit his job to take up a new one, he was assured by the company that his dues would be cleared within 45 days. But days turned into months, and repeated reminders and emails went unanswered with the dues still not paid. Not wanting to go in for time consuming and costly litigation, Ashish who had lost all hope of ever getting his dues, said he was advised to file an insolvency petition under the bankruptcy laws. “However, I am not sure if this will be fruitful”. There are many…

The weather is sultry and the temperature is scorching in the Raipur locality of Jadavpur, off South Kolkata. The furnace-like conditions have forced residents to stay indoors. But Meena Nag is unmindful of the heat and is getting ready to wash a bucket full of clothes near a pond in the locality. The 60-plus woman says that water supply is often erratic in the locality and the low pressure of water in the taps means it takes a long time for the bucket to get filled up, causing long queues that often end in mild altercations. “We face water crisis…

“Please do not hang your underwear and female lingerie openly in the balcony,” a visibly embarrassed neighbour told Nirmal. The neighbour’s balcony faces that of Nirmal, a food connoisseur and among the best chefs in Kochi, who lives in the apartment with his girlfriend. “It is samskaram,” said the neighbour. A Sanskrit term that has many connotations---culture, tradition, heritage. It was the unending samskaram problems they faced in their earlier apartment that forced Nirmal and his girlfriend to move to their present flat. It can get even worse for single working women renting an apartment in Kochi. This writer, a…

This article is supported by SVP Cities of India Fellowship “I have aged parents to take care of, and two younger brothers to educate. That’s one of the reasons I am doing my MBA.” After completing 12th standard from a government school in Bongaigaon district, Assam, 23-year-old Merajul Hoque has come a long way, quite literally (around 2700 kms, in case you are wondering). An employee of the multinational security company G4S, he has been working as a security guard on deputation to a family in Bengaluru for over three years. While the term chowkidar has become popular for all the…

For a city as dense and expansive as Chennai, it is not surprising that the city corporation has its hands full in terms of public works, and particularly so in the area of waste management. According to the 2011 census, the population density is over 26,000 persons/sq km. The sheer number of households, not to mention offices and factories, ensures that the city generates a large amount of waste. That, however, is not an aberration even when one looks at the country as a whole. India is slated to become the third-largest consumer market globally by 2030. According to a…

28-year-old Kamlesh Kumar moved to Uttar Pradesh’s Noida from Patna eight years ago, in pursuit of a better life. Kumar is one among thousands of rickshaw pullers (rickshaw-wallahs), mostly in their mid-20s or early 30s, who moved to Noida in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), to try their luck and earn better wages and better standards of living than they could dream of in their home towns. Reality however has been less benevolent. Noida or Gautam Buddh Nagar’s rickshaw wallahs often find themselves constantly trying to juggle the hardships of rent, finding cheap food and getting affordable medical treatment.…

It is perhaps one of the worst healthcare crises to have befallen the state of West Bengal ever, with the impasse in state-run hospitals showing no signs of resolution even as the strike by junior doctors in Kolkata and neighbouring districts enters the fifth day today. In fact, ripples of what started on the premises of the Nil Ratan Sarkar (NRS) Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata are now being felt in cities and towns across the country, with doctors everywhere expressing solidarity with their counterparts in Kolkata. According to latest reports, the Indian Medical Association has called for a…

After a failed attempt last year, the BMTC (Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation) has relaunched its online service to issue bus passes to students. From now, the application process for student passes will be completely online, and no physical application forms will be available, says Deepak N, Public Relations Officer at BMTC. The 'smart card' bus pass issued online, would have the photograph and name of the student, along with a unique identification number encrypted into an electronic chip. The chip will also have data on the bus route taken by the student to and from school, and validity of the…