EDITORS' PICK

Chennai, the capital city of Tamil Nadu, is one of the fastest-growing metropolitans in the country. The growing population and city expansion has stressed the existing infrastructure of Chennai, especially the transport systems. The transport sector needs to be planned to cater to the existing needs and meet the future demands of the growing population by taking into account changing travel patterns. Multiple studies have been conducted to devise a cohesive transportation plan for Chennai such as the Integrated Transport Plan 1977, Madras Area Transport Study 1986, Madras Route Rationalisation Study 1986, Traffic and Transportation Study for MMA 1986, Comprehensive…

At Citizen Matters, we review the promises made in the respective electoral manifestos by all four leading electoral parties, namely, the Shiv Sena (SS), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) ahead of the BMC elections in February 2022.  We review whether these promises made by them have been delivered, and where Mumbai currently stands on these issues. To kick start the series, we look at the promises made on the issue of providing clean and safe water supply.   Water requirement in Mumbai  Mumbai currently provides 188 litres per capita per…

It did not last long. 10 days after the reopening of schools in Delhi for Classes 1 to 5, they had to be closed again because of severe air pollution in the national capital region. According to the latest, schools will remain closed till November 21st, but if they do reopen after that, the experiences and observations reported here from early November may well continue to present the true scenario among schools, teachers and students. Sagar and Sonali were overjoyed when they learnt that they would be going back to their school in Ghazipur from November 1st. Their mother Kriti…

Bengaluru is increasingly becoming a city with more roads and flyovers, and with less spaces for public interaction or informal encounters. As in other Indian cities, here too, administrators imagine a city that meets global standards of urban form and infrastructure. Whereas, at the neighbourhood level, people continue to nurture and sustain spaces like ashwath kattes (peepul tree shrines), informally generating community spaces. And these spaces - which assimilate the rural within the urban - survive even as government agencies have been rampantly usurping public spaces for various projects. There are two competing processes in city-making – one, from above,…

It was around 5 am on November 7th, Sunday, when VS Jayaraman was woken up by his brother, who stayed in the ground floor of their apartment. There was considerable commotion at their apartment complex during the early hours of that day. Water had entered all the flats in the ground floor of the building, which is located on Motilal street in T Nagar, as a result of the heavy rains and the subsequent flooding in Chennai through the night of November 6th and the early hours of November 7th. “We immediately notified the Corporation officials as well as the…

Guarantee: An assurance for the fulfillment of a condition (Merriam Webster Dictionary) A trite and tired cliché, but so true. There are no guarantees in life. A truth brought home starkly and tragically to millions of urban workers, as the country shut down overnight in March 2020 to battle the COVID pandemic. And again earlier this year, as the second wave hit. And now, fearful of another lockdown as wave three of the virus threatens to strike, workers are again wondering if they will be left without any jobs. But the bigger tragedy is that those stark images of migrant…

Rarely do government circulars not raise a controversy. And the latest one by the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB) is no exception. The circular mandates “Retrofitting of Emission Control Devices/Equipment to all Diesel Generator (DG) Sets with Capacity of 125 KVA and above in Karnataka”. Based on a National Green Tribunal (NGT) order on controlling air pollution, the circular specifies a minimum mandated Particulate Matter capturing efficiency of at least 70%, with a corresponding increase in fuel efficiency. The order makes it compulsory for DG users to get their emission control devices certified by one of five laboratories empanelled…

A tragedy awakens public authorities like none other. Vehicles screeching to a halt near potholes, more often than not, stay out of their earshot until a gruesome accident jolts them. And it was the unfortunate demise of a 32-year-old tech professional, Mohammed Yunus, near Little Mount on Anna Salai, that has put the spotlight back on potholes in Chennai — a problem that is often brushed aside as “mundane.”  The Highways Department swiftly carried out patchwork across the entire road following the incident. A senior engineer at the department, who wished anonymity, said that a complaint was filed with the police…

The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government in 2010 passed the Chennai Unified Metropolitan Transport Authority (CUMTA) Act with the intention to oversee and coordinate the activities of the various agencies involved in the planning and operation of the transportation system in the city. However, a decade since the Act was passed, the much talked about nodal body is yet to get off the mark and remains largely on paper. Chennai city is famous for its multiple modes of public transport in the form of suburban trains and the Mass Rapid Transit System (MRTS) operated by the Southern Railways, the Metro…

Six months after Minister for Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) Nitin Gadkari introduced the much awaited vehicle scrappage scheme in the Lok Sabha, the Delhi government on September 27th announced its new policy to scrap all 15-year-old diesel vehicles in Delhi and the NCR. “Diesel vehicles older than 15 years will be impounded and sent to the scrapping yard if they are found plying on city roads or parked in public places,” said Delhi Transport Commissioner Ashish Kundra. The scrappage policy announced by Gadkari is a government-funded programme to get old vehicles off the roads. This is expected to reduce pollution,…