Revival of cities

For Vineet Gautam, the tall deodar tree in the backyard of his heritage home Mayvilla, had become a threat to his life and property. A massive landslide caused by incessant rains had washed away 80-100 metres of common road in the vicinity of his 1928-built home, dangerously tilting the massive tree. Having spent a night of anxiety and fear in his home, Vineet moved his family to a safer location the next morning, and had to spend three days to convince the municipal corporation to cut down and remove the tree. Vineet Gautam was fortunate as the civic authorities responded…

The Surat fire tragedy in a coaching centre which claimed the lives of 24 students has impacted coaching centres in Bhopal as well. A fire safety inspection ordered by Kalpana Srivastava, Divisional Commissioner, found that none of the coaching centres had even basic fire safety facilities. The four inspection teams found that in the 250 odd coaching centres in MP Nagar, the city’s busiest area where a majority of the coaching centres are housed, and other localities, many did not even have a fire extinguisher or a fire alarm system and were ill-equipped to deal with any unforeseen emergency fire…

25-year-old Aparajeeta Bhattacharya lives in New Town, a fast growing satellite city on the fringes of Kolkata. She works in a private company just four kilometres from her house within the New Town limits and regularly travels in the newly-introduced air-conditioned electric buses, which she says are convenient and also good for the environment. “The electric buses are almost silent and also friendly for the environment, as they do not consume fossil fuel and emit toxic gases. We should all strive to do something for a better environment,” she says, adding that the fare is also reasonable at just Rs…

As this article gets ready for publication, we already know of 24 fatalities caused by relentless rainfall and flash floods in Himachal Pradesh and other parts of north India. Several deaths have been reported from the capital Shimla itself, while hundreds remain stranded in various other parts of the Himalayan state. However, this is not the first extreme weather event to befall the region in recent times, nor, unfortunately, does there seem to be much hope of such disasters being stemmed. Will the allocation of some extra funds in the name of green bonus and the setting up of a…

An expression of panic mixed with hope flits across Hamid Ullah’s face every time his mobile phone rings. A Kashmiri earning a living as a porter in Shimla, Hamid fervently hopes that the call is from home. The panic stems from anxiety about the state of his family whose lines of communication with the outside world remain completely cut off for the past six days. “Eid is just a few days away and I have not been able to speak to my family for over 72 hours,” says Hamid, who hails from Anantnag, sitting outside the local Jama Masjid. “What…

It literally took an international outcry to force the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to step in and try to find a solution to the rising mountain of waste that is East Delhi’s Ghazipur landfill. At a time when Swachh Bharat is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s focus and debates rage over climate change, the PMO has stepped in to seek help from experts to grapple with the challenge posed by the country’s tallest mountain of waste. On July 10th, it issued a 12-page Global Request for Proposal (RFP) for tackling this problem. An IIT Kanpur alumnus and  Principal Scientific Advisor to…

On June 18, 2019, the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority (NOIDA) sent a team of personnel and machinery to reclaim a 5-acre plot along the Dadri-Surajpur-Chalera (DSC) road in Sector 48 (Map 1 below). The plot, a part of the Barola village agricultural land, was acquired for developing NOIDA in 1976. The Authority claims that most landowners took compensation for the loss of their land. Since the official master plan of the city (NOIDA Master Plan 2031) shows the plot as a ‘green belt’, the marble market that sprouted there in early 2000s, alongside some old and new pucca residences,…

“The beauty of Shimla lies in its conceptualisation by the Britishers,” says Dr Ravinder Dhiman, a Shimla-based history researcher. “Primarily, it was modelled as a hill station for their summer recess. Yet most features and facilities built by them were similar to the Smart City concepts currently being drawn up. But in the existing conditions, these smart city concepts sound utterly unrealistic and highly impracticable”. Shimla is one of the 30 urban centres chosen under the Smart City Mission launched by PM Narendra Modi in 2015. The Rs 2,905 crore project, which has been approved by the centre, aims at…

ON JUNE 18th, Upper Vaitarna, one of the few lakes that provide water to Mumbai, hit zero. Appeals of saving water trickled across the city and the Brihanmumbai Mumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) assured citizens that it would dip into its safety stock in other lakes. When monsoon finally arrived, it came with the decade’s highest 24-hour rainfall. Mumbai was flooded; trains, buses and flight services disrupted; and 32 people dead.   But no one was surprised. “It happens every year. A couple of days ago we barely had any water and now the city is waterlogged,” Prashant Patil, a resident of…

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…