EDITORS' PICK

Jacob D’Souza, 63, a resident of Matunga and a school bus operator for schools in Mumbai, once owned four buses and operated independent bus services in five neighbourhood schools in and around Sion Koliwada. Two years into the lockdown, he is left with just one bus and struggles to make ends meet with that. Within a year of the lockdown, financiers seized two of his buses for defaulting on loan repayment. “My buses were confiscated despite my sound credit record of paying all my dues on time,” said Jacob. “They didn't care that I had no income due to the…

Over the past  few years, especially after the December 2015 floods, we have seen varying figures  on the number of lakes being restored in the Chennai Metropolitan Area. Greater Chennai Corporation, through the Chennai Smart Cities Limited has a goal of restoring  210 lakes, working with NGOs and other civic organisations who are also working on lake restoration independently. Much of these restoration efforts are volunteer-driven and typically involve clean ups, erecting fences and creating spaces for birds. Some restoration efforts also involve removal of encroachments, desilting, and reviving connecting channels.  As of June 2021, around 180 water bodies under…

It would be an understatement to say that humans are dependent on their electronic gadgets or devices. In this day and age of work from home and e-learning, where the pandemic has ensured that individuals and families spend most of their time within the four walls of their homes, it is safe to say that we’re all hooked on to some or the other electronic appliance, one way or the other. However, the question remains as to what happens to these electronic or electrical devices once their shelf lives are over? That is, when they have been reduced to 'e-waste'?…

Last year, Chennai experienced intense rains and flooding yet again, bringing the city to a standstill for days. Excess flooding in the city has been associated with poor planning and urban development projects over the years. Rapid urbanisation in erstwhile agricultural lands and wetlands, and increased concretisation have altered the natural flow of rainwater. This is what has often led to debilitating floods.  Existing infrastructure to manage flooding has been criticised by city dwellers and environmentalists for incomplete construction, lack of topographic study before implementation, and lack of linking drains to natural channels.  A growing concern is the fact that…

After over a decade, elections to the council of the Greater Chennai Corporation have been announced. As the city authorities waited for the dates to be announced, work to resurface the pothole-ridden roads of Chennai was taken up in different parts of the city. This starts with milling, a process in which a portion of the surface on the top of the road is removed with the help of a milling machine before it is resurfaced in accordance with the guidelines specified by the High Court of Madras. Given our bad experience in the past, members of the local residents’…

The constitutional right to vote has been the cornerstone of India’s democratic foundation. In a country as diverse, with 900 million registered voters in 2019 as per Election Commission figures, the model for exercising universal adult franchise has often been applauded. But the model remains beset with a set of unique challenges. One such long-standing challenge is checking duplicate entries in the country's electoral rolls. To address this issue, the union government has now proposed linking of the Aadhaar and the voter ID, as represented by the Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC). The proposal immediately evoked strong criticism and raised…

On January 27th, Citizen Matters hosted a webinar on the state of urban planning in Mumbai to address discrepancies in the city's socio-economic, infrastructure and environmental planning. Moderated by Meenakshi Ramesh, Trustee of Citizen Matters, the panel consisted of people from backgrounds of architecture, urban planning, anthropology and education. The panelists were Rejeet Mathews, program director for urban development at WRI India, Aslam Saiyad, a photographer and documentarian deeply interested in issues related to riparian communities in Mumbai, Akhtar Chauhan, former director of Rizvi College of Infrastructure, Berjis Driver, an urban planner and associate member of the Institute of Town…

In 2020, while most of our population was quarantined in their homes, my family was lucky to live in a society that allowed us free use of the roof terrace for exercise. My husband, daughter and I often enjoyed morning breakfasts up there, and every evening we made it a point to run around, play and exercise. As the first wave waned, slowly, things started opening up. We were overjoyed. We could finally enjoy watching the sun go down the horizon and be in the greenery to ease our anxieties and move our bodies. What became clearer to us was…

Since the onset of the third wave, a surge in home testing for COVID-19 in Mumbai has brought new challenges for the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). Mylab Discovery Solutions, the manufacturer of 'CoviSelf', a self-testing kit, which sold about 25,000 kits in Mumbai in December, saw its sales jump to about five lakh on January 7th. By January 11th, 96,000 people in the city had tested themselves using home testing kits. Of these, 3,000 had tested positive according to Mumbai's mayor Kishori Pednekar. And with no rule or law in place at that time making it mandatory for those doing home testing to report…

On June 4th, 2021, a leopard took away a four-year-old girl from the lawns of her house and later mauled her to death in a nearby nursery. The little girl’s body was found after two days in a nursery, barely a few hundred metres away from her house, in Ompora locality of Central Kashmir’s Budgam town. The incident left the entire wildlife department of Kashmir shaken.  Four-year-old victim Adha was playing in the lawns of her home when the leopard took her away. Her family was totally unaware of the incident. Some wildlife officials said that the leopard had in…