Environment

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…

Join hands to clean 25 Km of Chennai beaches! Come June 19th and the Chennai Trekking Club (CTC) will be organising the 7th edition of the Chennai Coastal Cleanup (CCC7). This is one of the club’s key events where almost every CTC-ian gathers to take a pledge to move towards a garbage-free Chennai. CTC passes a strong message on environmental awareness through the initiative. It has organized six editions of Coastal Clean Ups since its inception and partnered with the Chennai Corporation in its last edition. Countdown to Event This event is now over. The ambitious target for the coming…

Are you a young professional passionate about water security and poverty reduction? Would you like to be part of an ambitious programme to make five million poor people water secure by 2022? We are looking for 12 young professionals with no more than five years of professional experience to form a Junior Global Advisory Panel. Members can be from any region in the world and from varying professional backgrounds (academia, industry, government and practitioners). Suitable areas of expertise would be water resources, WASH, wastewater, health, agriculture, poverty, garment industries, refugees, or gender. The Junior Global Advisory Panel will complement the Global Advisory Panel which consists of globally-recognised…

Garbage isn't exactly Rocket Science but given the filth around us, one would think it is! Given that the Government struggles with Execution and Enforcement of its well thought out policies and programs, we looked to see how exactly we can get a handle on this and if it was even possible. Turns out, it is definitely possible and "We" can do a lot with what is in our control. To understand exactly what is going on, click here. Or cheat and just read the below. (And follow too!) You and your family 1. Compost! Start by taking the one…

"Garbage, sewage and construction debris are eating up Bengaluru's Chunchaghatta lake situated in the Konankunte ward, adjacent to Eshwar Layout in southern JP Nagar." This is what an article on Citizen Matters said, more than five years ago. The article can be read here. (Chunchaghatta = Chunchughatta)  Now residents from the area have taken it upon themselves to clean up the lake. Do join the Friends of Lake - Chunchughatta Kere on Sunday, 12th June 2016, 7 a.m. to help clean the lake. Assemble at the flagpost, Gaurav Nagar, behind Brigade Gardenia. More details are in the poster below.  

A dry for years lake finally looks like a proper water body. Ever since we took up the cause of Puttenahalli Lake over seven years ago, this had been one of our goals - to see the entire lake bed submerged. 20th May 2014 6th June 2015 For over a year, excess treated waste water from the STP at South City Apartment Complex is being discharged into the lake. This has percolated and saturated thoroughly the earth below before showing up on the surface. The rain water added to this increasing the level to an unprecedented height. While we were…

This is an excerpt introducing the book Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the past, present and future, written by Harini Nagendra, a Professor of Sustainability at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, India. The book is scheduled to be released on June 10th, 2016, at 6.30 pm at Alliance Francaise, Bengaluru. My office is in the peri-urban fringe of Bengaluru. From a place that was fairly rural, in ecology, lifestyle and livelihoods, this area has transformed almost literally in front of my eyes in the past decade into a mess of congested traffic, garbage dumps, slums cheek by jowl with apartment blocks,…