Environment

Pic: Shubha Ramachandran Often times we (BIOME) are asked to compare the prices of recharge wells quoted by various well diggers. After speaking with the clients, we realise that they maybe comparing apples to oranges. Apples to oranges – since the well is not a standardised product but requires and includes several components and activities. Each well digger has his own vision of the well and related costs. Hence this blog post will throw some light on the components and activites that go into the making of a recharge well. And here we are not speaking of quality of activities…

For over 10 weeks now, Friday after Friday, volunteers from CTC and other organisations, have been tirelessly cleaning up the Adyar river, inside the Theosophical Society grounds. While it is distressing to see the amount of garbage they have cleared from this verdant expanse, arguably Chennai's lungs, the commitment and enthusiasm of the volunteers is amazing! Here are some images from the clean up over the weeks.  

Every city, even a giant metropolis like Bengaluru, still has a few patches of green, blue or brown that have managed to survive or at least allay the formidable onslaught of concrete and glass. Look carefully in these oases and you’ll be sure to find a sign of life (or five)! Snakes Among the most revered and reviled animals in India, snakes are also very common in our cityscapes. Bengaluru has about 40 species of snakes of which six are venomous. Most snakes, even venomous ones, will flee upon detection. They only stand their ground when provoked or unable to…

A night view of M G Road. Pic: Shree D N After finding out I would be coming to Bengaluru, an Indian city I knew just as the "Silicon Valley of India," having grown up in Seattle, I became fascinated with the idea of comparing my hometown to B'luru. The differences between these two cities, 8,000 miles/13,000 kilometers apart, are stark (food, geography, language, ethnicity, weather, traditions, you name it). Finding the similarities, I thought, would be more of a challenge. The questions I had in mind: do Bengalureans romanticise their pre-tech past as much as Seattleites do? Do they…

"Did you see how she did that?" I was lucky enough to attend numerous concerts, most often at the Bangalore Gayana Samaja, with my late guru Seethalakshmi Venkatesan. In every concert, we had attended together, she unfailingly pointed out nuances brought out by the performer of the day.  i Recently when a friend shared a video of Carnatic vocalist Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer performing at a sabha in Chennai, I was reminded of this when I saw the audience at this concert. A virtual who's who of today's Carnatic music stars were seated in the audience listening to the stalwart sing.…

A Memorable Morning at Neelankarai It was 5.25 a.m on June 19th. We were walking towards the Beach from East Coast Road. I'm part of Just Volunteer, an independent volunteering group and along with 30 volunteers from my team, I was on my way to the 7th Edition of the Chennai Coastal Cleanup organized by the Chennai Trekking Club. This was to be my 3rd Cleanup participation since 2014, when I had joined the 5th edition as an individual volunteer. The excitement was palpable the minute we reached there and we met the zonal leads. The briefing sessions were precise…

Chennai Coastal Cleanup booty: ­30 plastic spoons, nylon rope, 4 torn chappals and more! My daughter and I chose the Marina Light House location, along with a few children from her school. We are not newbies to clean­ups, having participated in various such activities in and around Kotturpuram, including the Chitranagar and Suryanagar slums. But the challenge of the beach is that things are buried deep in the sand and it's tougher to dig out the trash! In the middle of our activity we had these memorable moments... Mr Dhanraj who, as far as we could tell, lives on the…

When Civic Mindedness Triumphed Over Apathy For all those times we have walked past a mound of garbage on the street and turned our nose up to declare: "ugh! What filth! Why isn't anyone doing anything about it?", a whole bunch of us decided to stop passing the buck and get into the swing of things ourselves. It was time for Clean Up on an epic scale. It was pre-dawn, on a Sunday morning. Time usually spent in stockpiling on sleep and stubbornly resisting the family members' perky efforts to rise and shine. But this was not one of those…

Reclaim Chennai’s waterways, say ‘no’ to floods! There are close to 3600 water bodies in Chennai, Tiruvallur and Kanchipuram to store and recharge water and channelize excess water into the sea. However, the indiscriminate development of real estate on and along these water bodies and channels in the absence of any regulation has spelt disaster for the city. Rampant violations of building norms, maladministration in maintenance of our water bodies and the canals connecting them, improper planning and failure to construct new canals in the low lying areas, all contributed to the suffering of lakhs of people last December. But…

Do your bit against climate change: Keep your house cooler Just around six months ago, Chennai was gradually tottering back after the devastating floods. Water levels had just receded, electricity came back on and cars began speeding on the roads again. But even as people shifted back to normalcy in daily life, talks were abuzz about another important shift that was required -- one towards a more sustainable and environmentally conscious way of life. While urban sprawl, shrinking water bodies and unauthorized construction have been widely blamed for the disaster Chennai faced, the broader factor that was discussed was human-induced…