GENRE: In Focus

Over the years, the water bodies in Chennai and across the state have been polluted and damaged due to many reasons including rapid urbanisation and encroachments. Time and again, the restoration work being carried out in these water bodies make it to the news. Often, the local bodies rope in Non-Governmental Organisations to oversee or carry out either the entire or some portions of the restoration work. This apart, many private companies also chip in with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funds to carry out restoration work. While the restoration work is carried out by different agencies at different places, there…

65-year-old Sain Ullah Khan has been driving a taxi in Mumbai for the last 35 years, but his life turned upside down during the COVID pandemic, in 2020. Two years ago, the lockdown took away his income and savings and now he is troubled by high Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) prices. "I used to take Sundays off before the lockdown and work only till noon on Fridays but that has not been possible for the past two years. If I take an off now, we'll be left hungry. Eid is the only time I can afford a holiday," says Khan. Having…

In the sweltering Chennai summer heat, Amala endearingly helps her friend Pavithra who is fretting and nervous about riding a bicycle through the busiest roads of Arumbakkam. To add to her stress, the ordeal is unfolding at 9 pm, a time highly unusual for women to commute casually in Chennai. While Pavithra anxiously pedals, constantly shifting uncomfortably in her seat, with several eyes watching her every move, Amala and her friends join Pavithra in solidarity. They cheer her on, as she slowly and gradually adjusts her eyes to the dizzying traffic and steadies herself to a comfortable pace.  Cycling in…

"Currently, district or city-level disaster management departments are predominantly concerned with rescue and recovery, rather than resilience and preparedness, which is what they have to focus on," says Jaya Dhindaw, Program Director of Integrated Urban Development, Planning and Resilience at World Resources Institute, India. Masterplans for the city are made for longer spans but cities develop at a much faster pace in comparison to these planning processes, researchers say. "The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) does not have the agency to make plans for cities," says Garima Jain, Gilbert White fellow at the Arizona State University, who works closely with…

March 10 2022, is the date that Priya, 16, and her mother Laxmi, 39, will remember for the rest of their lives. On that date, Priya's father Annadurai, 50, lost his life while working in Mumbai's Kandivali area. He was one of three men employed for manual scavenging, a practice that removes human excreta by hand from sewers or septic tanks. This work was supposed to pay each of them Rs 500. Annadurai was a sanitation worker under private contractors. He was hired for work at Kandivali along with his three friends - Rauf Syed, Krishnamurti and Ganpati. With no…

On paper, Bengaluru has a decentralised framework for disaster management that puts urban local bodies at the helm of such efforts. But the recent floods in several parts of the city left residents of even high income gated communities in knee deep water for days. But residents of the city's low income settlements, especially informal settlements, were left largely to their own devices. "When we ask the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), they say they're waiting for the water to recede to visit the residential settlements and survey the damage," says Nalini Shekar, co-founder of Hasiru Dala, questioning the municipality's…

Mr G R Alfred Rupak, correspondent of St. Antony’s Matriculation Higher Secondary School, Thiruvottiyur says it started on July 5th, when a pungent odour akin to LPG gas permeated the air, forcing students to exit their classrooms. The malodour also affected other residents of Thiruvottiyur and Manali, with many reporting breathlessness and eye irritation. The stench, they feared, was a sulphur dioxide leak from the Chennai Petroleum Corporation Limited (CPCL) which operates a refinery in Manali. TNPCB addresses gas leak in North Chennai The Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (TNPCB) issued orders at once for CPCL to monitor ambient air quality;…

In late August, Deepak Khilare, 40, undertook a 12-hour journey of 600 km with his family of five, including his aged father and a 10-year-old son, to visit Mumbai's King Edward Memorial (KEM) hospital from his hometown Nanded. A daily wage labourer, Deepak had sustained an injury while working at a construction site a month ago. This caused trauma to his spine and impaired his leg functions. The family first admitted him to a private hospital, but little improvement in his condition and dwindling savings forced them to move him to KEM. The fact that Deepak's relative was admitted there…

If you have friends and family in other parts of India, you may hear them say, “It is too hot and humid there. I do not want to come to Chennai.” Well, Chennai's heat and humidity may not tempt tourists, but it is certainly attractive enough for tuberculosis (TB) bacteria to thrive.  With climate change staring the city in its face, the risks Chennai runs are not just environmental but have far-reaching implications on health. Could climate change also lead to an explosion of TB cases in the city? How can we protect ourselves from such possibilities? When does TB…

Each suicide is a personal tragedy that prematurely claims the life of an individual and has a continuing ripple effect, affecting the lives of families, friends and communities. Every year, more than one lakh deaths by suicide are recorded in India. A total of 1,64,033 suicides were recorded in 2021 alone. The recent data released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) highlights that Chennai stands second among the metropolitan cities in the country with an alarmingly high number of suicides in 2021. The data shows that Tamil Nadu stands second among the states with highest number of suicides in…