EDITORS' PICK

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…

As a first-time apartment buyer in Bengaluru, in 2016, I heard of many instances of builders/developers simply walking away without creating/forming an "Owners' Association" and handing over the apartment's assets in a systematic way for various reasons, including The lack of bandwidth with the builder to create/form an ad hoc-committee of the Owners' Association and take them through the association formation and registration The extent of deviation from "sanctioned plan" to "as constructed" exceeding 5% (allowed deviation)The builder's desire to retain control of the property and sometimes even plans to add additional built-up area. Improper calculation of undivided share (UDS)…

In late August, Deepak Khilare, 40, undertook a 12-hour journey of 600 km with his family of five, including his aged father and a 10-year-old son, to visit Mumbai's King Edward Memorial (KEM) hospital from his hometown Nanded. A daily wage labourer, Deepak had sustained an injury while working at a construction site a month ago. This caused trauma to his spine and impaired his leg functions. The family first admitted him to a private hospital, but little improvement in his condition and dwindling savings forced them to move him to KEM. The fact that Deepak's relative was admitted there…

If you have friends and family in other parts of India, you may hear them say, “It is too hot and humid there. I do not want to come to Chennai.” Well, Chennai's heat and humidity may not tempt tourists, but it is certainly attractive enough for tuberculosis (TB) bacteria to thrive.  With climate change staring the city in its face, the risks Chennai runs are not just environmental but have far-reaching implications on health. Could climate change also lead to an explosion of TB cases in the city? How can we protect ourselves from such possibilities? When does TB…

During monsoons, road infrastructure in Mumbai becomes a nightmare. Potholed roads are seasonal and don’t fail to appear after the first shower. Just before the monsoon set in this year, the Western Express Highway, SV Road and other major roads seemed to be in a better state, creating an illusion that they would survive the season. Within a few days of rains, craters and potholes appeared all over Mumbai. The Twitter timelines of MMRDA and BMC were filled with complaints. Updates by the Traffic Police on traffic snarls on roads across the city. Source: Mumbai Traffic Police, Twitter A distance…

"At midnight on August 30th, we woke up to thigh-high water flooding our homes," recalls Bheemesh, a resident of an informal settlement located in Tigalarpalya, adjacent to Brookefield's BEML Layout. "We rushed outside, barely having had the time to collect our things. When we came out, we found out that the entire settlement had been submerged". The last few weeks have been difficult for citizens across various regions in the city. Several bouts of heavy rainfall has inundated roads and flooded residential layouts. The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) said this was Bengaluru's second wettest August with 369.9mm of rainfall. The…