GENRE: Solutions

Why do sharp, witty lines from Dale Carnegie’s books cut the misty, morning breezes in Mitra Jyothi, a school for the visually challenged in Bengaluru? How did the author become a dramatis personae here, you wonder. Ratna, a volunteer, walks out from one of the audio rooms. She proudly says that textbooks, magazines, competitive exams, novels, fiction and biographies in Kannada, Hindi and English are converted into CDs, so that they can be documented and made accessible to visually challenged students. The technological details are rather complex but interesting. “With Daisy Resources, we are transcribing a number of books into…

The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines Health as "a state of complete physical, mental and emotional well being and not merely an absence of disease or infirmity." And yet we often find ourselves paying heed only to one of these domains in isolation. Oft-neglected are the domains of mental and emotional well being or rather, the lack of it. As someone who is a fledgling in the study of Mental Health, I'd like to share my two cents on  Mental Health. The mental health pandemic Mental illnesses have been known to humanity since time immemorial. Even the ancient Indian scholars…

It is not possible to make the city pothole-free in 10 days. So it is unclear what the government hopes for, by ordering BBMP to do this. It may as well order the rains to stop! Keeping a city pothole-free is not difficult. But that requires doing a few things right to BEGIN with. The responses after things go wrong won't help. The only thing we can hope for in 10 days is to see whether the government and the BBMP begin to do things differently in the way construction and maintenance contracts are set up for roads and footpaths.…

About a year ago, the government of Karnataka approved a steel flyover road that would run from Basaveshwara Circle till the Kempapura junction after the Hebbal interchange, to ease the traffic congestion leading to the Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) which was estimated to cost a whopping Rs 2,100 crore. Little did they know this project would become a lynchpin that would energise citizen activism like never before. Thousands of people came out on an early Sunday morning to form a human chain and tell their government that it was a terrible idea. The offset of a collective awareness that Bengalureans…

Whenever there is a discussion about the process of voter registration, people complain of delays in the registration process and red tapism. In a recent article on Million Voter Rising campaign published on Citizen Matters, the citizen campaigners who are coaxing people in Mahadevapura constituency to get themselves registered said that they have been facing the issue of delay in voter registration. The BBMP officials who handle the voter registration are said to be responsible. How can the voter registration system improve? What is the solution for this problem? ‘Involve Indian Postal Department’ One long-standing demand has been to involve…

The garbage mafia did it again - they held Bengaluru to ransom, by stopping waste collection last week. The government of Karnataka had to invoke Essential Services Management Act (ESMA) for them to stop protesting and get to work. But waste collection is yet to resume in many parts of the city, with piles of mixed waste lying on roadside. What causes this situation? Even after having court-monitored processes to set the system in place, why are we still suffering? Where does the rot lie? The answer: it lies in the system itself. The current waste management system is designed…

What are Employment Exchanges? An Employment Exchange is a government establishment which offers employment support to the unemployed youth on the basis of their educational qualification and work experience. The Department of Employment and Training, Karnataka looks after Employment Exchanges in the State including the offices in Bengaluru. Exchanges act as a bridge between the job seekers and the employers. They inform about the vacancies in public and private sector to the job seekers and pass on the information/data of the job seekers to the employers - both government and private - which the employers may use whenever there is…

Nirvana Country in Sector 50, Gurugram, Haryana. A sprawling 108-acre scenic and lush green community comprised of 1100 independent bungalows with independent gardens. When writer Chetan Mahajan and his wife Vanduta moved in here, they had perhaps never imagined that they would eventually be forced to move, and that too for environmental reasons. The vast acres flanking the community was dotted with strewn plastic bags and mounds of waste being burnt at odd times of the day. Pollution levels had risen to unbearable heights and families were moving out with their elderly and children. The Mahajans were among them, as…

In recent years, a number of Bengaluru’s lakes got a second chance at life by undergoing extensive renovations, which has left them pristine and healthy ecosystems. But the work is not over yet. The newly rejuvenated lakes require a lot of maintenance to ensure their survival. And most of the times, all of this is put on the shoulders of community lake groups made up of passionate citizens. For many groups the hard work is just getting started, as they must raise a continuous amount of funds, fight encroachment and petition for improvements to solve sewage problems that continue to…

Every time I visited the Wazirabad Bundh site to watch a lush linear forest taking shape in the middle of our city, the dirty storm water drain would bother me no end. iamgurgaon – a citizens’ movement focused on improving every aspect of life in the Millennium City – had been working on the bundh for a year and a half and it was clear that the work would remain incomplete if this drain full of debris and plastic was not cleared. The drain was such an eye sore that I decided to seek permission to clean the 200 metres…