GENRE: Voices

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…

The recent weeks have been difficult for Bengalureans. Bad roads and potholes we were already used to, especially around monsoon; but this year, the situation got worse. Garbage seems to be piling up once again. The biggest shock came when several buildings collapsed, just like that. Thankfully there is no loss of life, but it exposed the cracks in our system and made many of us wonder if all the unchecked growth is coming back to haunt us. While most citizens are outraged, very few express frustration publicly. A small subset of them want to ‘do something’ to ‘fix things’.…

In November 2019, the erstwhile chief minister of Tamil Nadu inaugurated a pedestrian plaza in T Nagar’s shopping area of Pondy Bazaar with much fanfare and promise. The project, under the Chennai Smart City Mission, was designed to give priority to pedestrians over the rush of vehicles that usually dominated the streets. Along with this came the promise of clean streets and better parking facilities. Of course, it also implied that there would be no inconvenience caused to the residents in surrounding areas. However, almost two years into the project, many issues which were initially thought of as teething troubles,…

On October 22nd, Citizen Matters hosted a tweet chat with Kaveri Medappa, DeliveryBhoy (an anonymous Twitter handle of a former delivery worker), and Abhishek Sekharan to discuss the issues delivery workers deal with on a daily basis. Kaveri is a researcher at University of Sussex, she is known for her work studying the experiences of delivery workers in Bangalore. DeliveryBhoy is an anonymous food delivery worker who brings focus to poor working conditions of gig workers in the country. Abhishek Sekharan, is a Researcher with Centre for Internet and Society CIS India doing interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies…

On October 1st, a day before Gandhi Jayanti, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a sequel to his flagship and equally lauded and critiqued programme, the Swachh Bharat Mission. The aim of  Swachh Bharat 2.0, added Modi, is to make “urban areas garbage free”. He stressed that in the second phase, “the garbage mounds in cities will be processed and removed completely. We are processing about 70% of the daily waste; the next step is to take it to 100%.” Swachh Bharat 2.0 will also focus on source segregation of solid waste, utilising the principles of 3R’s (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle), scientific…

“Bad for shop assistants, good for shoppers. That is the obvious inference from the upheaval in retailing that is leaving shopping malls and high streets…” says The Economist (March 13, 2021). The article goes on to admit that it may be an over-simplification of the crisis in retailing and how consumers will continue to crave for human attention and help when they shop. The bigger question, however, is ‘will retail-linked jobs disappear totally’? Or will they become more complex and nuanced? When the Indian economy opened up in the late 1990s and car brands started flooding the market, one of…

I started commuting to work by cycle in 2011, to avoid the stress of getting stuck in traffic jams on the Outer Ring Road (ORR). Surprisingly, I found that cycling was not as hard as I imagined it to be. Slowly, my frequency of cycling increased, and while the traffic jams on ORR, Whitefield and Sarjapura Road peaked too, it hardly affected me. I was riding a 23-km round trip everyday to work, come what may! Cycling brought immense flexibility and freedom to my schedule. Now, due to COVID and the work-from-home option, the number of commuters including cyclists have…