Environment

Bengaluru is growing, but at a much faster pace than expected. With such rapid urbanization, peri-urban areas are concurrently growing faster beyond the planned rates of infrastructure development of local ecosystems. The random expansion of cities by dissolving or merging the boundaries of nearby cities, towns and villages in a disorganized manner without any foresight poses various social, economic and environmental risks. In Bengaluru and its vicinity too, this has predictably led to an imbalance in terms of growth versus maintenance, witnessed by increasing slums, growing threat of newer and virulent epidemics, and poor access to basic services such as…

He has an air of spirituality and wisdom that is beyond his 29 years. As he sits in his office and tells me about the journey of Environment Foundation of India, I cannot but help wonder what I was doing with my life when I was his age. Nothing important comes to mind. And here I am, face to face with this young man, who has already helped save and restore over 39 lakes and 54 ponds in the country! Arun Krishnamurthy is one of the world’s youngest awardees of the Rolex Award for Enterprise. The award recognised his contribution…

Ten weeks have flown by and my internship with Citizen Matters has come to a quick end. Tomorrow, I will board a flight, but I will not be leaving India just yet. I am looking forward to three weeks of travel around the subcontinent to see what else this country has to offer. The author on the beach in Goa. Pic: Kate Clark But soon enough, I will be struggling to nap on 16-hour flight back to Dallas, Texas. When I picture exiting the Dallas Fort-Worth airport, driving a few miles toward my parent’s house in suburban Texas, I can…

We launched the crowdsourced Blackspot Mapping Project (garbage dump mapping project) in the last week of August, 2016. Two weeks into the project, we are already nearing 200 spots. As we reached out to people for help, we also faced many questions: Why are you doing this? What’s the intent? What will this data be used for? So many apps to map garbage and other issues - why should we contribute data to this project? In this article, we try to explain it all in detail. Why are you doing this? What’s the intent? Our cities suffer from multiple problems.…

Sometimes dry, barren-seeming patches of land have so much of interest in them. Recently, my friend Manivannan S spotted, in a small empty lot, this Painted Grasshopper. The wiki entry on this gorgeous-looking creature says that the grasshopper feeds on the poisonous plant Calotropis gigantea. Certainly, these grasshoppers had stripped all the Calatropis (milkweed) plants nearby. Striking in appearance... The mature grasshopper has canary yellow and turquoise stripes on its body, green tegmina with yellow spots, and pale red hind wings. The wiki also mentions the interesting fact that these grasshoppers, when squeezed or handled, upon slight pinching of the…

‘Swacch Bharat!’ We have seen a lot of hype about this programme in media but what is the reality? Of course, many things are happening in little pockets around the country, about which we read or hear. It does give us some hope that some day, maybe after half a century, we may see some difference at least in certain localities. However, as an individual, my experience has been a bit disappointing. Firstly, the once beautiful garden city of Bengaluru is turning into a city of concrete, garbage, polluted water bodies and chaos at a very fast pace!  Cleaning up…

Eco-friendly Ganesha festival has caught up in a big way this year, in Bengaluru. Dedicated teams of volunteers have been struggling day and night, along with the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) and Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB), to put proper disposal systems in place, and to spread awareness among people. Making one's own Ganesha using clay was the mantra for hundreds of citizens this year. The result was obvious on the first day of the festival itself. According to Yatish Kumar K C, Additional Commissioner for BBMP West Zone, on the first daym there were 1350 clay Ganesha…

I H Sekar, a fisherman and environmentalist living near Pallikaranai marsh land in Chennai, is awaiting judgment for a case he filed a year back, to protect the marsh from yet another encroachment. This is the third case that he has filed so far on the marsh. This time the encroachment has been by the government itself, to build an RTO office which will be a dump yard for vehicles. The Pallikaranai marsh used to be spread across 6000 hectares some 50 years back, but only 600-odd hectares remain now. It’s still the biggest remaining wetland in Chennai, where destruction…

“Mahesh Sharma’s advisory for tourists: No short skirts, no travelling alone at night.” This headline has probably already made its way to your Facebook and Twitter feed and back again in the last 48 hours. It’s referring to comments made by Union Minister Mahesh Sharma during a press conference on Sunday at the popular tourist destination, Agra. Sharma warned female foreigners against wearing skirts or venturing “out alone at night in small cities” in India. His statement mimicked the existing sexist rhetoric rampant in international dialogues around crimes against women: It’s the woman’s fault. Her clothes were some sort of provocation. Why was…

Sarjapura village/town, located in the south of Bangalore Urban District, has about 26 lakes in a radius of 7 km. Said to cover about 505 hectares, the largest lake is 271 acres big. If one looks at google maps though, one would find it difficult to find any water patches. Indeed, the lakes are currently bereft of water, but residents of the area have learnt, from local old-timers, that these lakes were full just a decade ago.       Inspired by the efforts of Bangaloreans to save their lakes, residents of Sarjapura, under Sarjapura Residents Welfare Association (Sarajapura.RWA), they have taken…