OPEDS

As a person who has attended probably a few thousand short and long meetings, I can vouch for the fact that you cannot run a company without meetings. And even if a lot of employees feel they are a waste of time, the alternative to having meetings is the ‘command, control, dictate’ system of working. Where all decisions get taken by a few people who then dictate their decisions to the rest of the organization. Without meetings, what we call the modern day organization will collapse. But researchers have been trying to figure out ways to make meetings more productive.…

Housing is a fundamental social and economic need that determines the quality of life and health of people. Housing also underscores the deeply entrenched urban plight of our cities. 6.5 crore persons, that is 1 in every 6 persons, lived in slums and informal settlements in India in 2011. The existence of 33,510 slums, surveyed in 2013, in our 4,000 plus cities is another staggering statistic. Long-term marginalization of these neighbourhoods, is visible in the poor access to water and sanitation amenities in slum households. The census of 2011 showed that  43.3% households did not have water inside their homes…

There can be no dispute over the fact that the frequency, intensity and spread (new cities getting affected) of urban floods is increasing in India. The reasons are mostly known: increasing and mostly unplanned urbanisation, rural-urban migration, encroachments of water bodies, concretization of flood plains and other lands, decreasing capacity to hold, store, recharge and drain the rainwater, increasing rainfall intensities with changing climate, wrong operation of big dams and deteriorating governance. The damages are going up, also because our forecasts are far from reliable, accurate, location-specific or with sufficient lead time. Because of our incapacity to learn lessons. Disaster…

On August 19, 2020, Axis Bank, one of India’s leading private sector banks, announced that they are exploring a ‘Gig-a-Opportunities’ mandate: the company has 85,000 full time employees but over the next three years, 15% of their incremental hiring will be based on alternative models of working, said the Bank. This may be new for India but approximately 150 million workers in North America and Western Europe have left the relatively comfortable existence in a corporation to a life as independent contractors. It is possible that some of them did not have a choice, but all of them seem to be…

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,…

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…

India employs 90% of its workforce within the informal labour sector. According to ILO estimates, four million workers are employed as domestic workers (of which three million are women). According to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, more than 10 million people are registered as street vendors. The NSSO survey findings from 2011-12 highlights that there are 37.4 million home-based workers in India. With limited laws and policies governing them they are often left at the mercy of their employers, who have become their proxy social security providers during the pandemic. Over the span of the last three…

There is evidently not much good news floating around in the economy. First, some numbers. In 2019, according to ILO estimates, youth unemployment rate in India was at 10.51%. This figure has hovered around 10% for the past decade. But unemployment rate among the urban youth is much higher. According to data released by the Centre in its Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2017-18, unemployment among urban youth in the age group of 15-29 years was at 23.7% in that December quarter, rising consistently over the three previous quarters of that year. If that trend continued, and all reports indicate…

The warning bell was rung by the Prime Minister when he announced Janta Curfew on March 22nd this year. I had returned to Mumbai on March 13th after a series of Board Meetings in Chennai. We were discussing annual operating plans but knew that we may be hit by a tidal wave soon. We did not expect it to be a Tsunami.  When I spoke with HR heads of companies in mid-May, many said that they knew a lockdown was coming. Many global companies had issued a diktat as early as March 15th to move employees out of offices. The challenge…

Today, 7.8 billion people celebrate the World Environment Day amidst circumstances that are far rare and different from anything we’ve been through − we have been massively hit by a pandemic, the economy faces a sharp slowdown, swarms of locusts have destroyed food crops in the Middle East, the horn of Africa and many states in India, fires have burnt down million hectares of forests worldwide, ocean temperatures are rising and cyclones have become frequent and fierce destroying cities in a matter of hours and impacting urban services and infrastructure. Our rivers and oceans have become a plastic soup, many…