garbage

This article is part of a special series: Air Quality in our Cities The drastic rise in air pollution levels in Indian cities over the years has been a cause of extreme concern, especially after the World Health Organization (WHO) pointed out that several Indian cities were part of the top 20 most polluted cities in terms of PM 2.5 levels. As part of a recent study by Aishwarya Sudhir ( supported by Co-Media Lab and Climate Trends), titled Bengaluru’s rising Air Quality Crisis, air pollution levels were tested for PM 2.5 (atmospheric particulate matter with diameter less that 2.5…

On Saturday, October 27th, the city will be witness to yet another human chain, organised this time by the disgruntled citizens of Bellandur, one of the largest wards of Bengaluru with a tax collection of Rs 220 crore. The residents of the ward seek to highlight their issues and put forth their demands to make Bellandur livable. Residents point to the serious discrepancy of funds and infrastructure for the ward by all standards. As per the BBMP Budgetary expenditure (Source: Janaagraha), Bellandur (27 sq km) has got an allocation of Rs 6-7 crore in the annual budget. Considering the parameters…

It has been six years since Bengaluru’s waste management mess was brought to the notice of the High Court of Karnataka through a Public Interest Litigation, by Kavitha Shankar and the Solid Waste Management Round Table team. While the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) has undertaken many measures to help manage waste better, there is lots more that remains to be done. When the PIL began in 2012, the city of Bengaluru was producing about 3,500 tonnes of waste per day, with no waste segregation in place and all waste going to landfill. All mixed garbage from the city was…

We fondly remember Bangalore as the garden city - tree-lined streets, an incomparable quality of life, and the glorious weather. Many of us, who had the opportunity to leave the city and our neighbourhood, came rushing back. That was how deep our love for the city has been for generations now. But today, when Kaggadasapura residents step out of our four walls of homes and offices, our hearts bleed. Why? Because Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) deems it fit to use the centre of Kaggadasapura - a central and populous residential area and home to diverse demographics and age groups…

We have been living in Perambur, Chennai since 1975 and I recall having spent the early days of my life in a reasonably quiet and clean neighborhood. With economic development and urbanization the entire neighborhood has today transformed into a bustling area, with all sorts of problems. Individual houses have made way for new high rise apartments, gardens have been replaced with covered car parking, trees have been cut down to facilitate construction of roads, SWD’s and the foot paths are extensively encroached upon with transformers and power distribution pillars. Given the speed at which things are changing we neither…

It no longer comes as a surprise to anyone -- the annual monsoon headlines describing how India's megapolis Mumbai is gasping to keep its head above floods caused by heavy rain, while citizens rue that there is little they can do to dam it. Still, sometimes, there are fledgling ideas that do lead to action, even if at a hyperlocal level. Radha, a citizen activist from Lokhandwala Residents' Association at an apartment in a shopping-cum-residential area got into the act immediately. She says that when her locality was getting flooded, the main cause of the excessive water was found to…

Some 25 years ago, most of us knew that sound, air and water pollution were the most common forms of pollution in the world around us. Accordingly, our efforts were also directed towards reducing noise, smoke from vehicles and the like. But then some people pushed me, and I made an effort to understand the problems about which I had been ignorant. And I learnt that our land may also get polluted. Just as plastic, thermocol etc can pollute our water and air, land too could be directly or indirectly polluted by their use, affecting our food chain as well.…

Every time I visited the Wazirabad Bundh site to watch a lush linear forest taking shape in the middle of our city, the dirty storm water drain would bother me no end. iamgurgaon – a citizens’ movement focused on improving every aspect of life in the Millennium City – had been working on the bundh for a year and a half and it was clear that the work would remain incomplete if this drain full of debris and plastic was not cleared. The drain was such an eye sore that I decided to seek permission to clean the 200 metres…

Independence Day 2017 turned out to be a bright, sunny, yet cool, day – a typical Bengaluru day, it would appear.  Yet, that morning we woke up to a rapidly flowing river outside our house that had completely submerged the main road leading into S.T. Bed Layout, Koramangala. A few hapless souls could be seen wading against the tide in at least a foot of water. Our compound was flooded, too. And murky water had entered many houses in more low-lying parts of the neighbourhood. A walk around the area a little before noon on Tuesday revealed that some roads…

On the morning of Sunday, July 16th, 10 of us, a group of teenagers, worked for almost four hours, scraping bills, removing garbage, and repainting electrical boxes near Marathahalli Bridge, Bengaluru. We started our work at 6.30 am. By the time we finished, the stretch of road was clean, colorful, and a pleasure to see! This is just one of many projects that we have taken up in the past year, working under the group name of Clean Up Bangalore, or CUB. CUB is an initiative that originated in August 2016 when three of us, Rithana, Achyutha, and Neha, found…