GENRE: Voices

Civic or community engagement is a continuous process, which requires relentless efforts. Members from Community Welfare Brigade W70Z6 and Perambur Neighborhood Development Forum have been actively engaging with the local administration and enforcement agencies on issues of public interest. While we have managed to address several issues, others are yet to be resolved. For example, what would a workable, efficient traffic plan for Perambur High Road entail? Community issues are complex and it’s important to make the problem-solving process inclusive so that decision-makers have a better understanding of their community’s needs and aspirations before setting a course of action. A traffic…

In September 2021, a mother-daughter duo was killed due to a fire that broke out in an apartment near Bannerghatta Road. After the incident, whether in the media or discussions with friends and colleagues, there was a sudden interest and surge of questions on who can be held accountable for fire accidents in high-rise buildings. Just last week, another fire in an apartment near Electronic City brought the issue into focus again. Often, people conclude that fire accidents occur due to the negligence of builders. The builders might either construct buildings in violation of the sanctioned plan or resort to…

With rising temperatures, unpredictable rainfall and extreme weather patterns becoming the norm over the last two decades, climate change has emerged as the single greatest threat to our species' survival on our planet. In the coming decade, called the #GenerationRestoration by the UN, several individuals and organisations will do their best to alleviate the climate change crisis. Amongst a range of actions out there, micro forests are emerging as one of the most popular, decentralised and effective ways to fight climate change. Micro forests, or Miyawaki forests, are small forests in urban settings. What differentiates them from other conventional landscapes…

Bengaluru is increasingly becoming a city with more roads and flyovers, and with less spaces for public interaction or informal encounters. As in other Indian cities, here too, administrators imagine a city that meets global standards of urban form and infrastructure. Whereas, at the neighbourhood level, people continue to nurture and sustain spaces like ashwath kattes (peepul tree shrines), informally generating community spaces. And these spaces - which assimilate the rural within the urban - survive even as government agencies have been rampantly usurping public spaces for various projects. There are two competing processes in city-making – one, from above,…

Guarantee: An assurance for the fulfillment of a condition (Merriam Webster Dictionary) A trite and tired cliché, but so true. There are no guarantees in life. A truth brought home starkly and tragically to millions of urban workers, as the country shut down overnight in March 2020 to battle the COVID pandemic. And again earlier this year, as the second wave hit. And now, fearful of another lockdown as wave three of the virus threatens to strike, workers are again wondering if they will be left without any jobs. But the bigger tragedy is that those stark images of migrant…

Last year, controversy arose over the Karnataka government’s decision to create a ‘tree park’ in the 600 acre Turahalli Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Bengaluru. Protestors questioned the conversion of an existing forest into a ‘tree park’; asserting that the ‘tree park’ would resemble ‘horticulture parks’ with manicured lawns and ornamental plants and not real ‘forests’. The project was stopped temporarily. In mid-2021, walkers around the forest noticed signs of activity. Work on the ‘tree park’ had restarted without any consultations with citizen groups or locals. The forest department had built a park with statues of tigers, peacocks, bugs,…

It is that time of the year in when winter smog sets in and air pollution spikes in Delhi. Delayed withdrawal of rains and consequent deferment of stubble burning this year had made October one of the cleanest in the last few years. But the onset of winter conditions – cool and calm wind, temperature inversion, rapidly increasing farm fires and overall trapping of regional pollution – has created conditions that may trigger the season’s first smog episode soon.   The SAFAR (System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research) programme of Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology had already predicted…

Chennai saw record downpour over the weekend, with many parts receiving levels of rainfall not seen since 2015. Many parts of the city have been inundated after the heavy spell that followed the onset of the northeast monsoon. Water-logging has made roads dangerous and unnavigable in many parts of the city. Water entered homes and other buildings and residents in low-lying areas has to be evacuated on emergency as a result of the urban floods. As in many other Indian cities, in Chennai too, a wide range of issues are responsible for urban flooding. The host of problems at the…

On October 16th, close to 50 families residing on the pavements near the Egmore Railway Station were evacuated and shifted to a temporary shelter near Pattalam, by the Chennai Corporation and the city police. The pavement dwellers alleged that they were evicted without any prior notice and that they had been forcefully moved. Several activists in the city had condemned this incident and also questioned the need for such hurried eviction without any prior notice and in the absence of any kind of arrangements made to permanently house the people. The irony is that this incident took place exactly four…

In March 2020, when the pandemic set in and lockdown was first imposed, spread of the virus, lack of adequate medical care, the lack of vaccines and loss of livelihoods of millions of citizens were the primary concerns among the government and the people. However, as time progressed and the radical changes to lives, livelihoods and lifestyles became more pronounced, increasingly, the discussions – both at a personal and at policy level – turned to the pandemic's impact on mental health. Add to that the several reports about skewed access to education and problems related to online education among children…