GENRE: Voices

[This article is part of the Bengaluru Moving series, in which citizens share their vision for BMTC post COVID. This series is pubished in collaboration with Radio Active’s #BengaluruMoving campaign.] Before the onset of COVID, BMTC was already struggling with very low share of traffic, and personal vehicles were clogging Bengaluru roads. Towards the end of this article, I have mentioned a few Key Success Factors (KSFs) that would help BMTC increase ridership. While these KSFs are still important, BMTC has been facing a new set of challenges with the onset of COVID, and hence must think of additional measures…

Historically there have been many ways of isolating patients with infectious diseases. The ill can be removed to a place where they cannot infect others. If they are treated at home the residence itself can carry a warning sign – a method that has been in place since the time of the plagues. The most disturbing however, and even traumatic for those living in such houses, is the prospect of being barricaded in. And yet, this is precisely what the city’s civic body is doing, and this is now being copied by other cities too. The modus operandi, so we learn,…

“Read up. You really should. There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.” These are famous lines from Arthur Conan Doyle’s 'A Study in Scarlet'. A problem or its solution have all transpired before. But have we missed the lessons? It has been nine months since the first case of COVID-19 was reported from Wuhan, China in November 2019. The problem took a life of its own and knocked on India’s shores through Kerala in January 2020. It became Bengaluru's problem in March of 2020. While Bengaluru started out well in keeping the pandemic under…

Recently, Citizen consumer and civic Action Group (CAG) conducted an online dialogue on Chennai’s Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC) bus service. The dialogue was part of a national campaign (Lakh ko 50) by the Sustainable Urban Mobility Network (SUM Net India), which asks the government to ensure that there are at least 50 buses per lakh population in our cities. The idea was to hear from commuters to understand what is needed to improve the bus service. Transportation experts also spoke on how the MTC’s fleet strength is inadequate for the number of passengers it serves, and pointed out that there…

During the day, they look like black plastic garbage bags blown onto trees by a strong gust of wind. As darkness falls, their arms unfold and they take off, flying between the multi-storied buildings in our Lokhandwala Township in Kandivali East. As you might have gathered, I've spent quite a few hours over the last few years watching bats, amazed at how similar they are to vampires in movies. Or maybe it's the other way round, vampires in movies are inspired by the wide black wings of bats. Hundreds of bats hanging like plastic bags. Photo: Arathi Manay Since the…

As we watched the whole world being gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic during the initial months of the lockdown, little did we know that the virus would hit so close to home, so soon. Six members of my family - my wife, elderly parents, three children and I were infected by COVID-19 in June 2020. Arming ourselves with the knowledge to combat the virus and keeping a cool head helped us overcome this ordeal. In the first week of June, my wife began showing symptoms of body pain.  On the second day, the body pain persisted and she was feverish.…

In India, a road accident happens every minute. Yes, you read that right, every single minute. Road accidents and India aren’t strangers. In fact, they are better acquainted than they should be. Sometime mid-July in Jamshedpur, Jharkhand six people were killed in two separate road accidents. Around the same time seven people died in five separate accidents in Gujarat. In Nashik, Maharashtra, five people were killed in two separate accidents in June. These are just a few instances from recent weeks of the thousands of road accidents that occur in India every year. Of course, since lockdown was enforced across…

M K Rao hails from a lower middle-class Mumbai-based family and needed a job. As luck would have it, soon after he completed his 10th exam in 1970, a friend referred him to a multinational company that was looking for office attendants. Rao’s smattering of English was enough for him to land the job. Given that the staff in that company was unionised and job guarantee was a done deal, he could have continued as an office attendant and retired at the age of 58 after serving the company for 40 years. Most of his fellow office attendants had been…

As schools struggle to adapt to the new classrooms, it is the children who are paying the price Pic: Sandeep J Gupta It is a strange question for five-year-old Arya to ask his mother - “How many meetings do I have today?”.  But we live in strange times and my friend’s son still cannot wrap his mind around the fact that he is expected to sit in front of a computer from 8.30 am to 12.30 pm for his classes or what he calls "meetings". His mother, Anitha Anand, a physiotherapist, doesn’t have answers either. And she is not the only…

[This article is part of the Bengaluru Moving series, in which citizens share their vision for BMTC post COVID. This series is pubished in collaboration with Radio Active's #BengaluruMoving campaign. In this first part of the series, a transport expert shares his ideas.] Before we look into ‘post-COVID’ Bengaluru, we need to look back at how our transport system was in pre-COVID Bengaluru. We were facing extreme growth in: Vehicular traffic (both in terms of number of vehicles and vehicle kilometers travelled) and congestion on city roadsTraffic accidents and fatalities, especially of vulnerable road users High levels of exhaust emissions including…