EDITORS' PICK

If someone from the city were playing Pictionary, and they had to guess from a drawing of floods or inundation, they would probably guess "Chennai" and be right. Flooding and Chennai have become synonymous with each other. No wonder the civic body is hurrying up with storm water drain (SWD) work in Chennai. Will SWDs be the panacea for urban floods? "No city in the world can rule out inundation [due to rains]. However, it will be much lesser than before in Chennai," says Gagandeep Singh Bedi, the Commissioner of the Greater Chennai Corporation, when questioned if the current monsoon…

Indore city has been declared the cleanest city in India for the 6th time in a row in the recently announced Swachh Survekshan 2022 results. Indore has consistently performed well in the Swachh Survekshan survey since 2017 due to its integrated approach to solid waste management and efficient waste processing. The city, with a population of nearly 2 million, generates about 1,900 tonnes of solid waste per day. The Indore Municipal Corporation has successfully integrated the collection, transportation, processing and disposal of solid waste generated in the city.  What made this feat possible is the rigorous waste management system Indore…

The Singh family in Ghaziabad didn’t pay much attention when their 62-year-old father suddenly began to struggle to find the right words or remember the names of friends. He had loved travelling, but he stopped travelling and even avoided meeting friends and relatives. The family put it all down to age-related idiosyncrasy. Dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease wasn’t something that crossed their minds at that point. Mr Singh passed away within a span of one year. He had frontotemporal dementia.  “We thought that retirement and COVID lockdown had made him irritated and stress was the culprit,” says Mrs Nath, wife of…

"I want a home,” says Dhanashree, a student of Class IX. “It should have a toilet with a door, at least one room spacious enough to stretch my legs and sleep and a kitchen of our own,” she adds. This is not just her dream but also that of hundreds of families in Kannappar Thidal who were evicted from the streets near Ripon Building two decades ago. Evictions in Chennai have become a common affair now with removal of encroachments, eminent domain claims, court orders and developmental projects being cited as reasons by various government bodies to carry out the…

The Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) unearthed a major milk adulteration racket operating from Dharavi recently, on September 15th. The accused were found slitting the milk packets and removing the milk. They replaced it with water before sealing the cut part with candle flame. The FDA officials seized and destroyed about 807 litres of adulterated milk worth Rs 45, 852. The FDA launched criminal proceedings in a joint operation with the Shahu Nagar police station. A milk adulteration racket busted at Dharavi during a joint operation raid by the FDA and the Mumbai police. Pic courtesy: FDA In another instance,…

65-year-old Sain Ullah Khan has been driving a taxi in Mumbai for the last 35 years, but his life turned upside down during the COVID pandemic, in 2020. Two years ago, the lockdown took away his income and savings and now he is troubled by high Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) prices. "I used to take Sundays off before the lockdown and work only till noon on Fridays but that has not been possible for the past two years. If I take an off now, we'll be left hungry. Eid is the only time I can afford a holiday," says Khan. Having…

Life with animals offers a bit of peace in today’s fast-paced, individualised world, where we often feel there is no time for family, community and care. Pets often give us company in these increasingly isolating times. However, raising pets in a city like Chennai comes with its own difficulties, especially when you raise them in urban spaces, which can often be unkind and dangerous to animals.  Over time, Chennai has seen numerous initiatives that rescue, rehabilitate and take care of animals in the city. The most well-known initiative is Blue Cross, which mainly deals with abandoned, injured and sick animals.…

Everyone in Mumbai has an anecdote about their time on the road; a pothole on a speed breaker, complete journeys done in first gear, magically cleared roads at the arrival of a VIP, and so on. Some of these stories of frustration and rage poured out in the Twitter Spaces event, organised by Citizen Matters, “Stuck on the road: The causes and fixes to traffic in Mumbai.” Held on September 13th, Citizen Matters invited citizen groups, experts, researchers and concerned Mumbaikars to share their two cents on how to address congestion in the city. With panellists well versed in diagnosing and…

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…

On paper, Bengaluru has a decentralised framework for disaster management that puts urban local bodies at the helm of such efforts. But the recent floods in several parts of the city left residents of even high income gated communities in knee deep water for days. But residents of the city's low income settlements, especially informal settlements, were left largely to their own devices. "When we ask the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), they say they're waiting for the water to recede to visit the residential settlements and survey the damage," says Nalini Shekar, co-founder of Hasiru Dala, questioning the municipality's…