GENRE: In Focus

The Bengaluru City Police don’t have authority to regulate traffic, drunk driving and speed on this private toll road. As a result of unchecked speed and not following regulations, there are deadly accidents every year on this road. When asked to take action, the company asks the government to disapprove any kind of inspection from police, and removes speed limits set for the road. And we are talking about NICE road, built by Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprises (NICE). Citizen Matters had published an article Top 10 acciden-prone places in Bengaluru based on the data collected from Bangalore Traffic Police. Electronic…

In July 2005, when 900 mm of monsoonal rains hammered Mumbai for a 24-hour period and wreaked havoc on the city’s infrastructure and housing, political leaders in Karnataka reassured us that Bengaluru was immune to flooding given its inland location some 3,000 ft above sea-level on the Deccan Plateau. Those assurances proved foolhardy. In October that year, over half of Bengaluru’s road network was inundated and thousands of homes and commercial establishments damaged following four days of unusually strong monsoonal rainfall. Floods in Bengaluru during October 2005, in Bommanahalli area. Pic: Champaka Rajagopal Ten years later, Chennai continues to reel…

Kasa - Rasa center. Pic: Pinky Chandran "There was a time when I didn't have enough food to eat. Now I am so busy that I don't have enough time for food," says Krishna, once a waste picker, now runs  Domlur Dry Waste Collection Center Ward no 112, and employs six people. Krishna is one of the many informal waste sector workers that run the Dry Waste Collection Centers (DWCC) in Bengaluru. DWCCs were set up following a Lok Adalat’s intervention directing the Municipality to set up these centers to enable ward level recycling in 2010. The Karnataka High Court…

People find it easy and cheap to use plastic carry bags. Pic: Shree D N Smitha is a homemaker in Malleshwaram, Bengaluru. Every time her husband gets vegetables from the market in lightweight white plastic carry bag, she saves it carefully. Everyday she puts one such plastic carry bag into the wastebin in her kitchen. She ties the carry bag with the wet and dry waste neatly and puts it for disposal everyday, for the BBMP garbage auto to take it away. Smitha doesn’t care about what happens to this carry bag later—that it might end up in an animal’s stomach…

Many of you may be interested in building your home on a plot owned by you. There are hundreds of private layout developers in all parts of Bengaluru, advertising all over newspapers and television. Private layouts are being developed along all the main roads from Bengaluru towards Devanahalli airport, Hoskote, Whitefield, Sarjapur, Attibele, Anekal, Jigani, Kanakapura, Mysore, Magadi, Tumkur and Nelamangala. Some of these projects are at a distance of nearly 50 kms from Vidhana Soudha. All layout developments have to fulfil legal requirements of the Land Revenue Act, the Land Reforms Act, the Town and Country Planning Act and…

Whenever there is a thought about banning plastic, the solution offered is to recycle the waste. But, to what extent can the plastic be recycled and reused? What happens to the plastic that is recycled for the tenth time and cannot be recycled again? Is there a solution at sight? Yes, solutions are not too hard to practice. There are a few people to prove this. First is the story of Khan brothers. In 1996, when there was a growing demand for the ban on plastic carry bags in Karnataka, two plastic manufacturers from Bengaluru—Rasool Khan and Ahmed Khan—began to…

Plastic waste from across the city is collected at Jolly Mohalla, before it undergoes recycling process. Pic: Akshatha M Abdul Khader, a middle-aged man, owns a modest plastic waste collection centre in the narrow lanes of Jolly Mohalla. Amidst the bunch of scrap dealers spread across this famous location close to K R Market in Bengaluru, Khader established his shop 25 years ago. For him and his three employees, the day starts at 4 am. Kabadiwalas and ragpickers throng his shop early in the morning carrying plastic waste from across the city. “I buy these plastic cups and plates for…

How many tuition or coaching centres are there in Bengaluru? A simple internet search for SSLC/ PUC or other subject coaching centres in Bengaluru will throw thousands of results at you. No one knows the exact number. Yet, of all these tutorials, only 28 are legal, while the rest are functioning illegally, right under the nose of Education department! Information collected by Citizen Matters from various education departments has revealed that only a handful of tutorials in the city have obtained necessary permission from the department to operate. Majority of the coaching centres that promise to give a bright future…

In the first part of the series Loans for poor in Bengaluru, we explored how the system of loan from informal sources with high interest rates is pushing the poor deeper into poverty. The second part explored the system of bank loans for poor, to see whether it benefits the poor who don’t have securities. In the third part, we examine how micro-finance institutions function, and what do poor people feel about it. Mariyal, a 33-year-old domestic worker living in Ejipura slum in Bengaluru, has taken a Micro Finance Institution (MFI) loan for the first time. She has borrowed Rs…

The first part of the series LOANS FOR URBAN POOR IN BENGALURU explained how the urban poor living in the slums of Bengaluru get trapped in the circle of borrowing, paying interest and re-borrowing. In this part, the author explores the reason behind the same—why banks do not help the poor—how complicated the process is. Sunil, a slum dweller in Swatantrapalya, wants to buy an auto. He needs a loan badly. Not keen on lending money from local moneylenders for extra interest, he wants to secure a bank loan. However, he doesn’t have any collateral security to offer to the…