EDITORS' PICK

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…

Like millions of Mumbaikars, Prashant, a diamond broker, does the first leg of his journey to work by the local train. But on descending at Bandra station, he switches to the Yulu bike, a means of transport available only to those who work at Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC). Stationed at Anant Kanekar Marg, the powder blue electric bikes are lined up with no apparent lock in place. Named ‘Miracle’, they are lighter and thinner than a scooter, faster than a bicycle. To unlock, one has to download the Yulu bike app and scan the QR code displayed on the stem…

Chennai has made strides in cycling in the recent years. The promising start has seen many new riders take to cycling during the pandemic. Recognising the need to make the city safe for cyclists, dedicated cycling lanes have been piloted in parts of the city. While these steps augur well for the future of cycling in the city, there is a long way to go in making cycling mainstream. Cycle lane in ECR  A proposal for creating more happy streets - closure of streets for activities by citizens - came from the cycling community and has been taken up with…

78-year-old D Suresh lives with his wife, son and daughter-in-law in Kilpauk, and he says he has bought only two LPG cylinders per year since 2012. His family does not eat outside every day, nor do they use electric or induction stoves for cooking their daily meals. "It is not rocket science," says the septuagenarian when he says that he has been generating his own cooking gas from kitchen waste for over nine years. When the waste decomposes in the absence of oxygen, Suresh gets biogas that he uses for cooking. This process does not happen in a scientific laboratory…