GENRE: In Focus

Last month, government bus drivers in Tamil Nadu struck work for over a week, throwing the cities’ commute scenario into chaos. The issue: long-standing demands over a wage hike. The bus drivers in the state have been demanding pay scales in compliance with the 7th Central Pay Commission (CPC) recommendations, approved by the central government in June 2016. Currently, in Chennai Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC), the basic salary of permanent drivers starts from Rs 17,700. This is according to a settlement that the MTC reached with some trade unions on January 4th. However, major trade unions including the DMK-backed Labour…

Have you walked around your city lately, and observed the collapsed Electricity Board wires and mounds of garbage near various government departments? Or the remnants from so called developmental work undertaken by the state or the various parastatal agencies? Even as we talk about waste and what can be done to manage household/industrial waste more effectively, piles of unattended debris and confiscated vehicles dumped by various government departments stand as testimony to the inaction by the Tamil Nadu Government. While the Chennai Corporation is frequently under fire for being unable to check dumping of unprocessed waste near water bodies or…

A few months back, Baiju P V, who owns a Vodafone postpaid connection, noticed that his monthly phone bill included charges for Value Added Services (VAS). “The charge was Rs 250 plus GST. I had neither requested any VAS, nor got any message informing me that VAS had been activated,” Baiju says. As per regulations of TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India), VAS - which includes caller tunes, live streaming etc - can be activated only with the double consent (explained below) of the subscriber. Baiju called Vodafone customer care and got the bill revised. But he was charged for…

If you are an environmentally conscious person, yearning to give back to Nature and the planet that sustains us, here is an opportunity in Chennai for you to know more and actually move towards translating your plans to action: the Reciprocity fest scheduled for the coming weekend (February 10-11th). Reciprocity concerns holistic sustainability, thus indicating that everyone is an affected stakeholder. Considering the steady rise in the mounds of waste in the city, the Reciprocity fest reiterates the need for citizens to join hands and do something to reduce and recycle waste. Seminars and discussions would be held on the…

It is sad, but common knowledge today that the city’s sewage ultimately ends up in the nearest lake or water body. In principle, the sewage from our homes should go to the pumping station via an underground sewerage connection. From the pumping station, this sewage should travel to the Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs), the primary function of which is to treat the sewage water through aerators, clarifiers etc. A study conducted by Arappor Iyakkam shows that untreated sewage water from different parts of the city are being let out in the three rivers—Adyar, Cooum and Kosasthalaiyar, apart from the lakes…

Mr. Prime Minister, In a TV interview recently, you asserted that a person earning Rs. 200 a day selling pakodas is also an employed person. Many people took offence to this statement, claiming that your promise to generate 1 crore jobs is a hoax. While we appreciate the fact that you recognise street vending as an employment, the harsh realities under which street vendors carry out their livelihood has been lost in your statement. Street vending is an independent and dignified profession. We are proud to be street vendors. However, we cannot take away the context in which we have…

The dream of having electric vehicles on the roads of Bengaluru came a bit closer to reality in the recent years. The city is slowly but surely moving towards electric vehicles. The recent push is the Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) putting out a tender for private companies to add electric buses to the diesel fleet. Last date for submitting bids is February 19, 2018. BMTC to procure electric buses According to Ashwin Mahesh, an urbanist and social technologist, the production of electric vehicles is quite a challenge, and will take time to stabilise. As the design, strategising and building…

The spate of horrific news from schools across the country does not seem to subside. The most recent incident, of course, is the mysterious death of a Class 9 student in the school toilet in northeast Delhi's Karawal Nagar. It is suspected that the teen died of internal injuries resulting from assault by a group of friends. Earlier this year in Lucknow, Hrithik Sharma, a Class 1 student, was stabbed on the back, chest and left eye by a girl in Class 7, in anticipation of a holiday that the school would inevitably declare in the wake of such a…

“Urbanisation is our opportunity and priority,” said Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his speech in Parliament, as he presented the Union Budget 2018, presumably the current government’s last big one before the nation goes for elections in 2019. Cities, per se, however did not see too much exclusive focus except in a few allusions to big-ticket schemes introduced by the current dispensation and a couple of city-specific allocations. Here is a quick round-up of what Budget 2018 had to say about the plans for India's urban future: Air pollution in Delhi and NCR Concern for the alarming levels of pollution…

The death of a 26-year-old intellectual disabled man in the city, two weeks ago, came as a rude shock to Chennaites, as it underlines two factors: absence of civic responsibility and apathy from the police department. M Praveen Kumar, who was waiting with his mother at Adyar gate to board a bus to his work place in Savera hotel, went missing after he got into another bus. Praveen’s mother lodged a complaint at the Teynampet police station and informed his colleagues, family and the volunteers of Vidyasagar, an organisation that works with people with psycho-social disabilities in Kotturpuram, and also…