GENRE: In Focus

“The beauty of Shimla lies in its conceptualisation by the Britishers,” says Dr Ravinder Dhiman, a Shimla-based history researcher. “Primarily, it was modelled as a hill station for their summer recess. Yet most features and facilities built by them were similar to the Smart City concepts currently being drawn up. But in the existing conditions, these smart city concepts sound utterly unrealistic and highly impracticable”. Shimla is one of the 30 urban centres chosen under the Smart City Mission launched by PM Narendra Modi in 2015. The Rs 2,905 crore project, which has been approved by the centre, aims at…

Jagraon, a small township about 50 kilometres from Ludhiana Railway Terminus, has nothing much to distinguish it from other such towns on National Highway 5, except for an infamous, but very important bridge named after it. Till July 14 2016, when it was barred for traffic by the Railways, the original British-built Jagraon bridge, along with a parallel single lane bridge built in 1970 to accommodate the increasing traffic, was the lifeline for commuters in Ludhiana, Punjab's largest city and industrial hub, which once led to the city being bestowed with the title, Manchester of the East. Built as simple…

Just like many students, I switched schools after 10th standard, and in the first week at my new school, I experienced a culture shock of sorts. Till 10th standard, I went to Prakriya Green Wisdom School, which had a very strict health-food-only policy. All the students ate in the school canteen that prepared simple meals from organic, minimally-processed material – some of which was even grown on campus.  The menu included dosa, idli, or poha for snack, roti or rice with sambar, a salad, a vegetable dish, buttermilk and payasam for lunch. Birthdays were celebrated with chikkis; chocolates or any…

Fifty-six-year-old Seema Adgaonkar glides through swampy mangroves in ankle-deep muck. The fragrance of Avicennia marina (the grey mangrove), the most widely-spread mangrove species in Mumbai, makes the trail pleasant despite the 36 degree Celsius hot and humid conditions. Adgaonkar relishes the scent as she walks in a single file with a forest guard and two helpers, towards one of the mangrove nurseries they set up on the city’s coastline. She gives the team instructions on where to plant saplings along the course and shares tips to identify some of the species with their regional and scientific names. “You’ve to know everything that…

Fifty-six-year-old Seema Adgaonkar glides through swampy mangroves in ankle-deep muck. The fragrance of Avicennia marina (the grey mangrove), the most widely-spread mangrove species in Mumbai, makes the trail pleasant despite the 36 degree Celsius hot and humid conditions. Adgaonkar relishes the scent as she walks in a single file with a forest guard and two helpers, towards one of the mangrove nurseries they set up on the city’s coastline. She gives the team instructions on where to plant saplings along the course and shares tips to identify some of the species with their regional and scientific names. “You’ve to know everything that…

ON JUNE 18th, Upper Vaitarna, one of the few lakes that provide water to Mumbai, hit zero. Appeals of saving water trickled across the city and the Brihanmumbai Mumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) assured citizens that it would dip into its safety stock in other lakes. When monsoon finally arrived, it came with the decade’s highest 24-hour rainfall. Mumbai was flooded; trains, buses and flight services disrupted; and 32 people dead.   But no one was surprised. “It happens every year. A couple of days ago we barely had any water and now the city is waterlogged,” Prashant Patil, a resident of…

1984: Vyjayantimala Bali | 1989: Vyjayantimala Bali | 2019: Thamizhachi Thangapandian.  And it ends there, this tiny list of women MPs elected from Madras/ Chennai. It took 32 years since the first Lok Sabha election in 1952 to get our first woman MP and a thirty-year wait for the second. Vyjayanthimala Bali was elected from South Madras constituency on the first two occasions and Thamizhachi follows in her footsteps, elected from the same constituency (now South Chennai). This only reiterates the immediate need for passing the Women’s Reservation Bill in the parliament to ensure that at least 33 per cent of seats…

In 2006, Pune became the second city after Ahmedabad to introduce the BRTS (Bus Rapid Transit System) project, an ambitious scheme that envisaged the implementation of a high-quality public transport system to offset the rising vehicular traffic and the subsequent congestion within city limits. To provide its citizens with a reliable medium of public transport, the scheme promised the construction and layout of dedicated bus corridors along with new air-conditioned buses and high-end terminals and stations. In its pilot phase, the project partly operationalised a high capacity bus system on two corridors, the Swargate–Hadapsar (East‐West) Corridor of 10.2 km, and…

It was not the first time, nor the last, but at 5.30 am on July 16th, around an hour after Metro services resumed, Vadapalani Station had no security officials to guard the baggage scanners or frisk commuters. Commuters who patiently followed rules by waiting at the baggage scanner were met with yells of the staff belonging to the Chennai Metro Rail Limited (CMRL). “Just collect your baggage and move,” shouted two staff members, pointing at the unmanned scanners and standing on the other side of the automated gates.  On July 18th, around 7 am, St Thomas Mount station saw a…

Alia, 15, cannot move or talk. “She is totally dependent on me,” said her father Mohammad Asad, an electrician. “Her mother passed away almost nine years back. I have to remain with her most of the time”. Even 35 years after the world’s worst industrial disaster that claimed 3787 lives in one night (unofficial estimates, however, put the number of deaths at over 20,000 till date, including those who died from gas related illnesses since) and left 500,000 permanently ill, victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy continue to suffer the effects of the deadly gas leak from the Union Carbide plant.…