GENRE: Report

The Clean Buddha Nullah programme, which had become a symbol of the extreme apathy shown by successive governments towards citizens raising this issue for years, seems to have received a much-needed impetus. “The Buddha Nullah issue had been in a state of limbo for the past 30 years,” said Jaskirat Singh, State Executive Committee Member of the Naroa Punjab Manch (NPM), a citizen body formed to highlight issues related to water pollution. “It was around the time the Citizen Matters story appeared that we formed the Naroa Punjab Manch and since then we have been actively taking it up with…

25-year-old Aparajeeta Bhattacharya lives in New Town, a fast growing satellite city on the fringes of Kolkata. She works in a private company just four kilometres from her house within the New Town limits and regularly travels in the newly-introduced air-conditioned electric buses, which she says are convenient and also good for the environment. “The electric buses are almost silent and also friendly for the environment, as they do not consume fossil fuel and emit toxic gases. We should all strive to do something for a better environment,” she says, adding that the fare is also reasonable at just Rs…

For the first time ever, the largest of the flamingo species, the Greater flamingos, one of the most widely recognized waders in the world, were spotted in the newly developed Sabarmati river front in Ahmedabad, much to the delight of citizens, especially the birders’ community. “I was delighted when I spotted a huge flock of about 50 flamingos when I went for a walk on the riverfront,” said hobbyist wildlife photographer Vicky Chauhan, a chartered accountant residing just 200 metres from the riverfront. “While we have seen flamingos in areas near Ahmedabad in the Fatewadi area, this was the first…

The videos were all over the Internet and social media. Expectedly so, because you don't often see crocodiles swimming in flooded urban streets, sneaking up on strays. But that's precisely what happened shortly after news of ‘urban floods’ in Vadodara hit headlines in early August. The city witnessed scary flash floods following spells of intense rain, bringing back memories of what the city had witnessed in June 2005 and then again in the monsoon of 2014, the latter perhaps leading to the coinage of the phrase ‘urban floods’. Back in 2014, ecologists had spoken up to communicate their worries to…

It literally took an international outcry to force the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to step in and try to find a solution to the rising mountain of waste that is East Delhi’s Ghazipur landfill. At a time when Swachh Bharat is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s focus and debates rage over climate change, the PMO has stepped in to seek help from experts to grapple with the challenge posed by the country’s tallest mountain of waste. On July 10th, it issued a 12-page Global Request for Proposal (RFP) for tackling this problem. An IIT Kanpur alumnus and  Principal Scientific Advisor to…

The balcony in Cultured, a cafe in Humayunpur, Delhi, gives a good vantage point of the daily happenings in the streets -- women walking the streets in their chic winter coats, men in trendy hairstyles going to office in their formal attire and people coming out to buy their daily groceries. On the same street one can see the local men of the village sitting in front of their houses with a hookah and a bonfire. Most of the young tenants in this urban village in Delhi are from the North Eastern states. As I sat in the cafe with…

Alia, 15, cannot move or talk. “She is totally dependent on me,” said her father Mohammad Asad, an electrician. “Her mother passed away almost nine years back. I have to remain with her most of the time”. Even 35 years after the world’s worst industrial disaster that claimed 3787 lives in one night (unofficial estimates, however, put the number of deaths at over 20,000 till date, including those who died from gas related illnesses since) and left 500,000 permanently ill, victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy continue to suffer the effects of the deadly gas leak from the Union Carbide plant.…

“Please do not hang your underwear and female lingerie openly in the balcony,” a visibly embarrassed neighbour told Nirmal. The neighbour’s balcony faces that of Nirmal, a food connoisseur and among the best chefs in Kochi, who lives in the apartment with his girlfriend. “It is samskaram,” said the neighbour. A Sanskrit term that has many connotations---culture, tradition, heritage. It was the unending samskaram problems they faced in their earlier apartment that forced Nirmal and his girlfriend to move to their present flat. It can get even worse for single working women renting an apartment in Kochi. This writer, a…

Every day at the main city bus stand in Dimapur, just across the Nagaland State Transport office in the heart of the city, you’ll find a large number of people waiting for the city bus. As the bus arrives, people rush in, in hordes. One really needs to have the physical strength to be able to aggressively push his/her way inside. Although the city bus comes in at an interval of about 5-10 minutes, this is the scenario every time. It is not uncommon therefore to meet young working women like Chumbayala and Agnes, who have been waiting for quite…

One among the first 20 cities selected for redevelopment under PM Narendra Modi’s Smart Cities Mission (SCM) launched in 2015, Bhopal faces the loss of a major chunk of its green cover, thanks to the implementation of the smart city project. The number of trees that could literally go under the axe may run into thousands under the Rs 3400 crore development plan in the city, which is still grappling with the consequences of the world’s worst industrial disaster -- a gas leak that killed thousands in 1984. The area chosen for implementing the project, Tatya Tope Nagar (TT Nagar),…