New Delhi

The balcony in Cultured, a cafe in Humayunpur, Delhi, gives a good vantage point of the daily happenings in the streets -- women walking the streets in their chic winter coats, men in trendy hairstyles going to office in their formal attire and people coming out to buy their daily groceries. On the same street one can see the local men of the village sitting in front of their houses with a hookah and a bonfire. Most of the young tenants in this urban village in Delhi are from the North Eastern states. As I sat in the cafe with…

With inputs from Sri Krishna, Delhi Dropping its sitting member Udit Raj and fielding a non-filmi Punjabi and Sufi singer Hans Raj Hans could make the going tough for BJP, which had won all the seven Delhi seats in 2014. Udit Raj, 58, National Chairman of the All India Confederation of SC/ST Organizations, has now joined the Congress, vowing “not even a single Dalit will vote for the BJP." AAP leaders, however, have said that Hans Raj Hans cannot contest from this SC-reserved seat since he converted to Islam in 2014. The 2008 delimitation exercise saw North West Delhi came…

In the narrow alleys of Pusta road in Khajuri Khas, near New Delhi’s Kashmiri Gate Metro station, a group of elderly people discuss the upcoming elections, standing near a rickety house not far from a pile of garbage disposed of by the locals. In these bylanes of Khajuri Khas, this is not an uncommon scene -- elderly, retired or unemployed people huddling together, discussing everything -- from neighbourhood issues to the government’s failures. As a reporter in search of a Mohalla Clinic, I approach one of them, Mohammad Ismail. Ismail is in his seventies and happy to talk. According to…

Savitha was still recovering from a stressful premature delivery, when her doctors informed her that she wasn’t producing enough milk for her baby. “After the birth, I still had instances of heavy bleeding and clotting disorders for which I needed constant treatment. My body was exhausted. My baby, who was in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) needed more milk than whatever little I was producing. I had no idea of what more I could do.” But Savitha’s doctors at Fortis La Femme did. Their solution? A breast milk bank. Breast milk banks aren’t a new phenomenon in India, but…

Narrow, crumbling roads, buildings on either side, cars and pedestrians navigating the maze. I glance at the navigation app on my phone. Less than 100 metres now. But it’s still nowhere in sight. Asking people doesn't help. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, a sharp turn. The GPS says I’ve arrived: I'm inside the congested urban village of Panchsheel Vihar, in front of Ramditti J R Narang Deepalaya Learning Centre. The Narang Trust formed by the family-owned Narang Steel, has donated the use of their building to Deepalaya—an NGO—rent-free, for close to forty years. It is within this building that…

Pictures of the smoke-ridden Indian capital city with its choking pollution levels and roads chock-a-block with vehicles are the stuff of front page news every other day, but now Delhi's new parking policy approved by Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal is expected to jointly address both the congestion and the pollution to some extent. The Parking Management Area Plan (PMAP), which came into effect in the last week of February, proposes a number of variable charges for residential and commercial areas; these charges are envisioned to impact the demand for parking space in Delhi, and in turn influence the usage of personal vehicles. However,…