HUMAN RIGHTS

Manasi Dighe (name changed) rises before the sun, changes into a sari, plaits her thinning hair, and sets out. At the crack of dawn, her eyes begin searching the road, hoping to find plastic, metal or glass items which, at ₹20 a kilo, could earn her ₹100 in a day. Manasi covers 20 to 30 kilometres daily, when barely a kilometre from her Bhim Nagar hut in Mankhurd, an eastern suburb of Mumbai, is Asia’s largest dumping ground—the Deonar landfill. Mumbai’s 12.4 million citizens send 9000 metric tonnes of waste to this 134-hectare dumping ground every day. If one corner…

Manasi Dighe (name changed) rises before the sun, changes into a sari, plaits her thinning hair, and sets out. At the crack of dawn, her eyes begin searching the road, hoping to find plastic, metal or glass items which, at ₹20 a kilo, could earn her ₹100 in a day. Manasi covers 20 to 30 kilometres daily, when barely a kilometre from her Bhim Nagar hut in Mankhurd, an eastern suburb of Mumbai, is Asia’s largest dumping ground—the Deonar landfill. Mumbai’s 12.4 million citizens send 9000 metric tonnes of waste to this 134-hectare dumping ground every day. If one corner…

The disastrous floods of 2015 and the Ennore oil spill stand out in the list. In addition, the city’s air and water have become more polluted than ever before.The city’s garbage has continued to remain a threat to the environment and health of the people living in the city. Through Amirtharaj Stephen’s lens, a look at Chennai’s environment over the last five years. Since the 2014 national elections, the capital city of Tamil Nadu has witnessed major environmental calamities, from the disastrous floods of December 2015 to the giant oil spill outside Kamarajar Port at Ennore in early 2017. Apart…

The National Coalition for Inclusive and Sustainable Urbanization, comprised of a group of people across different parts of the country, is involved in exploring questions pertaining to the city and whom the urban is meant for. The Coalition has recently put out a charter, endorsed by 150+ organizations and 2 lakh signatories across 40 cities, that lays out a number of steps that can be taken to make development in cities more inclusive and sustainable, keeping the real ‘Citymakers’ - urban poor and worker groups - and their rights at the centre of discourse and action. Right to Housing and…

India is in the midst of an acute unemployment crisis. Unemployment rate is at a 45-year high of 6.1 percent in 2017-18 as per the leaked Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) report of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO). According to the NSSO data, unemployment rate in urban areas is 7.8 percent with open unemployment of about 20 percent among the educated youth. In addition, majority in urban India work in the informal sector and are thus exposed to a host of risks and precarities. This, along with continued ecological degradation and crumbling urban infrastructure needs urgent attention. To address…

In the financial year 2016 -17, the Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation Limited (TASMAC), a liquor entity owned by the state government had a turnover of Rs 31, 247.53 Crore and earned a profit of Rs 25.23 crores as mentioned in its annual report. This was after temporarily closing 3321 TASMAC outlets following the Supreme Court’s order of relocating the shops, situated within a distance of 220 meters from the highways. But while the government that is reaping crores of rupees in profits from liquor sales, is it doing quite enough to rehabilitate addicts? Tamil Nadu is among the top…

Ashwin, Samreen, Shimon and Prem were just a bunch of toddlers when their parents moved to Lallubhai Compound in Mankhurd, a rehabilitation and resettlement (R&R) colony situated in Mumbai’s M-East ward. This ward has seen some of the lowest human development indices in the city and like most R&R settlements grappled with a range of social, economic and civic issues. Rampant drug abuse, sexual harrassment, high drop-out rates among children and other safety concerns were a regular feature and the residents, reeling under dire poverty, were too caught up in the struggle for day-to-day sustenance to actually address these issues…

“There has been a 20 percent increase in patients admitted for alcohol and drug abuse this year, as compared to 2007,” says Dr Poorna Chandrika, Deputy Superintendent, Institute of Mental Health. “Alcohol and drug related crimes are on the rise in Chennai. In over 25 percent of criminal cases in Chennai, the offender was inebriated during or before the crime,” says V Kannadasan, a criminal lawyer, practising in Madras High Court. The above data signify two things: one, the number of citizens falling prey to alcoholism and other substance abuse is clearly on the rise and that this may well…

It would be hard to miss the recent additions to the streets of Chennai over the past few months. The ubiquitous presence of tiny flickering lights that belong to the many CCTV cameras placed within 50 metres of each other at most roads and intersections have attracted considerable attention and publicity. The CCTV cameras are part of an initiative launched two years ago by the Chennai Police to combat crime. Dubbed 'Third Eye’, the campaign has gained steam over the last six months or so and now covers over half the city. Who's watching? The Third Eye campaign took wings…

Sitting in a tuition centre in Neelankarai, 21-year-old Rani (name changed) stammers as she reads meizhuthu (consonants) in Tamil. As the teacher pronounces the alphabet, the frail girl repeats it after her and tries to memorise it. She immerses herself in the effort, hoping she can shut out her recollections of childhood, filled with the stuff of nightmare for anyone, adult or child. Forced to give up studies at an early age, Rani slogged for more than a decade at a rice mill in Red Hills. “No one including me knew it was slavery. We had accepted it as our…