GENRE: In Focus

Kumar*, a food delivery gig worker rode back home after midnight on his scooter a few weeks back. Suddenly, a few cops stopped him on the way, captured his photo and then let him go. "Why are you taking my photo? I have my driving license and other documents, and I am also wearing my helmet," he asked them, flabbergasted and confused. But they did not respond. Little did he know that the Chennai police might have used their facial recognition technology (FRT) to see if his photo matched that of a criminal in their database. This has been one…

Weeks before her daughter was born, a heavily pregnant Chandni Bibi boarded a train to Murshidabad in West Bengal, from where she had another hour’s journey to her native village. Had she decided to deliver her baby in Mumbai, she would have to navigate the waist-high tidal waters that flooded the area around her home twice every day. A single room built of wood and sheets of scrap metal in a slum, her home stands on uneven wooden and bamboo poles driven into the soft soil where land meets the sea.  Among an estimated 6,000 homes built on the coastal…

It is a balmy Wednesday morning. Having arranged the chairs in rows and set the required vaccines ready on a wooden table, Selvi G, the Urban Health Nurse (UHN) of Valasaravakkam Urban Primary Health Centre (UPHC) in Chennai, awaits mothers scheduled to come in for the immunisation of their children. As the first of them arrive, Selvi gives them a heads-up that it is only normal for the child to cry after the injection and there is nothing to panic about. She tells them not to rub the injected area and to administer the medicine which will be given to…

A mangrove is a shrub that grows along coasts and has roots that are usually found underwater. Mangroves store ‘more carbon per unit area than any other ecosystem on Earth’, and aid in the fight against coral bleaching. They act as natural barriers against storms and rising seas, saving ‘more than $65 billion worth of property damage each year’, according to conservation.org. They thrive in subtropical nations since they are adaptive, and are the best option for mitigating the effects of climate change, be it sea-level rise or the frequency of natural disasters such as cyclones and storm surges. However,…

As station after station is built along the nearly 119 kilometres of Namma Metro under Phase 2, it is crucial to review the design of the existing infrastructure and analyse it through the lens of inclusivity and accessibility.  Any city comprises a diverse group of people with varying needs, and all public infrastructure must cater to different user groups such as persons with disabilities(PwD), trans persons, the elderly, parents with young children, etc.  The Metro Rail policy 2017, a central level policy that has to be adhered to at the state level, lays down guidelines requiring Metro infrastructure to ensure…

It is a promise all three parties in the fray made - clearing Delhi’s landfills, the three main sites being Ghazipur, Bhalswa and Okhla. Now it has fallen on the winner of Delhi's municipal elections, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), to fulfil that promise. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has specifically promised to get the three landfill sites cleared over the next five years; the first one to be done by 2024. Waste management overall, not just clearing the landfills, had figured prominently in the manifestos of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Congress too. The latter had described the Ghazipur…

A room of one's own is considered a basic necessity for a good life. But having one's own space to work, study and rest and a guarantee of privacy are a dream that is seemingly unattainable for many in Chennai. At a time when the city's real estate price seems to be skyrocketing, there are still many families who live in a single room in Chennai, without a proper roof and any ventilation. For these residents, the dream is not to build or buy a big multi-storey house, but merely call a space home where they can stretch their legs…

On November 8th, 28-year-old Aftab Ameen Poonawala was arrested for allegedly strangling his live-in partner Shraddha Walkar. They had had a violent argument. He cut her body into 35 pieces, kept them in a 300-litre fridge. Over the next few days Aftab disposed of the pieces at various places in Delhi’s Mehrauli forest area. While this incident — the Delhi Fridge case, as it is being referred to — has received relentless media focus, an increasing number of such gruesome crimes, often labelled crimes of passion, has been reported in the recent past. Family disputes and the breakdown of relationships…

On December 1st, Mumbai’s King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital became the first civic facility in the city to get approval for a 24x7 cardiac catheterisation lab. The approval comes a month after the announcement was first made in November. A cardiac cath lab functions as a centre for doctors to perform minimally invasive tests and procedures to diagnose and treat cardiovascular disease. It is the alarming rise in deaths due to heart attacks in 2021 that prompted Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) health officials to start a pilot 24x7 cath lab at KEM. Last year, Mumbai recorded a total of 17,880…

In a previous article, we looked at how personal data illegally collected by the NGO Chilume can impact the privacy and safety of voters as well as affect the integrity of our elections. The News Minute (TNM) and Pratidhvani reported that workers and external vendors, hired by Chilume, posed as booth level officials (BLOs), complete with identity cards signed by BBMP election officials, to illegally collect voter data. This is the second part of a series looking deeper into the implications of the Bengaluru voter data theft controversy. Part I: Illegal voter data collection: Does it really matter? Part II:…