OPEDS

Despite five years of a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the Karnataka High Court and hundreds of court orders, Bengaluru is way behind several other cities in the country in managing its garbage and is living up to the epithet it has earned: ‘garbage city’.   Except for a few wards where some good work may be happening, one hardly sees any change on the ground in most areas. In the meantime, several other cities have moved far ahead of Bengaluru in managing their waste. No wonder Bengaluru fell to a position below 200th in the Swachh Bharat Survekshan last…

Given the current scenario of increasing pollution in Indian cities, it’s quite likely that we shall soon have to breathe from canisters of clean air to avoid chronic respiratory issues. What we’ve been noticing in Delhi is clearly a man-made catastrophe. PM 2.5 levels are at an all-time high and almost 10 times those seen in Beijing. Citizens are seriously considering options to escape the toxic and unacceptably high levels of air pollution in Delhi. But as things stand, not everyone is lucky enough to be able to do so, the burden falling disproportionately on the poor. What is most…

The first ten days of November 2017 has seen a furious and unprecedented level of dialogue and mainstream-media conversation around the topic of air quality, specifically in and about the city of New Delhi. While the situation in the national capital is indeed dire, a large part of that conversation has been aided by citizens, journalists and community activism groups having access to scientifically validated real-time, hourly-updated data of the air quality levels in their neighborhoods and surrounding areas. The conversation around air quality levels for several years primarily involved scientists and researchers from leading Indian institutes and a few…

If recent news reports are to be believed, the Bangalore Metro is set to have coaches for women soon, according to Minister for Bengaluru Development and Town Planning K J George. The facility is expected to be implemented in 2019, when the total number of coaches will be increased from three to six. The demand for reservation had come from a section of women passengers, once the Purple Line (Mysore Road to Byappanahalli) became operational and ridership multiplied. BMRCL currently estimates that 40% of their nearly three lakh daily passengers are women, and plans to hold a survey to find…

A few days ago, I read on an online news website, that the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) was planning to make source segregation of waste mandatory for all residents, beginning October 2, 2017. If this was true, it was music to the ears of citizens like me – segregation maniacs that have been trying to get their family members, neighbours etc to segregate household waste at source – but with very limited success. Chennai reportedly generates the highest per capita garbage among the large metros in India – 750 gms per person per day, and we send about 5000 tons…

Nitin Gadkari’s recent plans to “bulldoze” India into a switch-over to electric vehicles has met with a fair bit of scepticism across quarters, perhaps because of the peremptory nature of his announcement and the lack of a detailed roadmap for the transition. However, this does create yet another window of opportunity to assess and analyse what’s making the move towards cleaner vehicles so difficult, and what could be done to remove the obstacles. The thrust on electric vehicles, considered to be a potential solution to the problem of alarming levels of air pollution in our cities, had in fact come…

Every time I visited the Wazirabad Bundh site to watch a lush linear forest taking shape in the middle of our city, the dirty storm water drain would bother me no end. iamgurgaon – a citizens’ movement focused on improving every aspect of life in the Millennium City – had been working on the bundh for a year and a half and it was clear that the work would remain incomplete if this drain full of debris and plastic was not cleared. The drain was such an eye sore that I decided to seek permission to clean the 200 metres…

The glass doors slid open, an air-conditioned breeze hitting our faces. It was less cold and much less forceful than San Francisco’s winds on the street. Some of my classmates and I (students from around the world) had come to the San Francisco Planning Department’s office on one of our weekly co-curricular visits. Our university would take us to different organizations in the city each week, for a chance to learn about their work and how it was impacting the city that we had arrived in only very recently. Just like how we stood at the foot of the Golden…

The Corporation of Greater Chennai falls back on certain repeat activities whenever it finds time hanging heavy on its hands. One is the beautification of the Marina and the other is the renaming of roads that commemorate the colonial masters. The latest to suffer from this are Montieth and Fraser’s Bridge Roads, which are to now become Red Cross and Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission Roads respectively. William Montieth entered the Madras Engineers in 1809, became Lt Col in 1826 and Lt Gen in 1854. Fraser’s Bridge gets its name from John Fraser who designed the municipal waterworks. Not undistinguished…

In an essay, ‘A Tale of Three cities and the search for Dharma’, sociologist and author Arshia Sattar examines the three cities depicted in the epic Ramayana. Ayodhya, the human city, Kishkindha, the monkey city and finally Lanka, the rakshasa city, each governed by codes of behaviour depending on who resides in them. As she puts it, in the cities, “ways of being and doing are determined and unalterable”. The ‘codes’ in each city are remarkably different, each allowing for a different kind of morality and way to live. The only similarity between them is that each upholds a certain…