GENRE: In Focus

Meghalaya has always prided itself on its pure water flowing from the crystal clear mountain streams and springs amidst pristine forests. But over the past three years, the state’s Public Health Engineering (PHE) department has been receiving numerous complaints about the poor quality of the water being supplied to homes. A Public Interest Litigation (PIL) and an “Own Motion” by the Meghalaya High Court (MHC), point to the urgency of the matter. The problem is that rivers are being polluted by unchecked sand mining, quarrying, rapid urbanization and other “developmental’ activities in the ecologically sensitive regions of this hilly state,…

“Public transport services in Kochi are not friendly for those of us who have different kinds of disabilities,” says Rahul, a resident of the city, who has reduced mobility. Rahul works for an organization in Kochi and has been using an electric wheelchair for the past year. But the wheelchair is useful for him only inside his place of work. Outside the office, he never uses public transport due to its inaccessibility and poor connectivity, and has to be dependent on personal vehicles and companions.  For Rahul, and others like him, it is not just the availability of trains and…

On the face of it all, the Lucknow Municipal Corporation (LMC) could not care less, even though the city is union defence minister Rajnath Singh’s constituency. The cleanliness survey conducted earlier this year by the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) ranked Lucknow as one of the dirtiest cities in the country. The city’s ranking dropped to 121, from 115 last year. Despite having an army of 9350 sanitation workers, 6281 of them on contract, and showing an increase in monthly petrol consumption of 1.5 lakh litres for transporting solid waste, the municipal corporation has fared poorly in…

“Bade mushkil se Eid mana paye,” says Mohammad Irshad, 53, of Shehjenabad locality in Bhopal’s old city area. “Pani hi nahin ghar mein. Mehmanon ki kya khatirdari kar paatey (we observed Eid with great difficulty. There is no water in the home. How could we entertain guests)? Bhopal, the “city of lakes”, is reeling under an unprecedented water shortage over the past 20 odd days, with the old city area, housing 43 per cent of the capital’s 21 lakh population, hit particularly hard. The entire supply of 30 MGD (million gallons per day) to these mainly low-income residents is from…

Over the past few months, Karnataka has become infamous for its treatment of taxi aggregator apps. It began with the state transport department banning Ola for operating bike taxis. Last week, the department ordered aggregators to stop shared-cab services too in the city. In the absence of a predictable public transport system, many of these services - shared cabs or bike taxis - had become cost-effective alternatives for Bengalureans. But despite their obvious benefits, state government continues to view such services with suspicion, and brings down the law on them. It is not that state government is particular about hindering easier…

One morning, nearly a month after Cyclone Fani struck Odisha, Ashok Baral, a citizen of Bhubaneswar, came upon a fallen trunk of a banyan tree near the Stewart School boundary wall. The tree had been uprooted by the cyclonic storm Fani, which hit the city on May 3, 2019. Recalling that particular moment, Ashok says, “Though it was my regular route home from the milk vendor, it seemed as if the helpless trunk of the tree was trying to tell me something on this particular day. I stayed there, looked at the trunk for some time, and wrote a message…

“I can safely say 50 to 60 percent of Shimla youths are drug addicts, consumers and even peddlers,” said Gaurav, 40, who runs a Drug Rehabilitation and Counselling Centre in Shimla. Once an addict himself, Gaurav said in many cases parents are not willing to accept that their child could be an addict. In his own case, Gaurav credits his parents for helping him fight his drug habit by sending him to a rehabilitation centre in Punjab. Now, Gaurav is doing his bit for others who have fallen into the same habit. “Not all are lucky like me to be…

The newly elected Bharatiya Janata Party at the Centre has announced the launch of ‘Nal Se Jal’, a poll-promise from its 2019 manifesto, to ensure piped water to every household by 2024. How big is the task? In India, only 32% households have tap water supply from treated sources, as per Census 2011. 18 percent or 6,25,000 households in the capital city, home to the nation’s rich and influential, do not have piped water supply. Yet, this city has one of the highest percentages of households with piped water among India’s 35 states and union territories. Only seven of these…

Despite the obvious damage it would cause to Bengaluru’s environment and ecology, the elevated corridors project had got Environment Clearance (EC) in no time. As citizen groups have appealed to the National Green Tribunal (NGT) to scrap the project, in this series, we look at how the project had got EC even as it avoided a rigorous environment impact assessment. EC is issued based on an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report that the project proposers submit. In the case of elevated corridors, the project consultant AECOM ( on behalf of the proposer Karnataka Road Development Corporation Ltd) had submitted a…

Long queues of women and men waiting for their turn at the tanker; schools forced to shut down due to water shortage; companies asking employees to work from home and even patients in hospitals bearing the brunt of water  shortage -- these are not scenes from any dystopian novel or movie. This is the reality Chennai is living today. The situation gets worse by the day as the city finds itself in the grip of another spell of widespread and acute water shortage. The scarcity of water has seen the city’s main reservoirs run dry. Borewells are depleted and the…