Environment

Bangalore, one the fastest growing cities in India, has been known as the Garden City. The city boasts of congenial climate that birds thrive in. Three hundred or more varieties of birds have been identified around Bangalore and its peripheries. With exponential growth of the IT hub of India, the city has seen rapid changes and this has affected its bird population. Some birds have shifted their nesting areas, some have become mere visitors and some have found a place on the endangered species list. In this series on 'Birds of Bangalore', we will talk about some of the birds…

Vijay Cavale was lunching with his boss and a Chinese client at a 5 star restaurant in Bangalore when the conversation veered towards money and motivation. The Chinese contended that man would go to any lengths for money, and Vijay laughed. But the former threw a challenge at him: “The Chinese offered 10 dollars for every salute I made, standing at the door of the restaurant, to any person who walked through” says he. Vijay laughed at him, but the man kept increasing the stake, and when it came to 1000 dollars, Vijay actually started considering the possibility, he says:…

I've been taking a closer look at "No Smoking" signs in town from a designer's perspective. Yes, there is a need to be loud and clear - at least till the message sinks in, and people don't look for an ashtray the moment they walk into a restaurant. Sign at Coffee Day near Lavelle Road And if they are going to be big and bold, can't they be a little more interesting? Some of the signs I've seen are so bold, that they come close to rapping you on the knuckles. So, if you run a business that requires you…

In a Lok Adalat hearing on 19th November 2008, at the High Court of Karnataka, Justice K L Manjunath pointedly asked Yellapa Reddy, chairman of the committee overseeing Bengaluru’s road widening project to listen to the petitioners' complaints on widespread tree cutting. The Adalat took exception to Reddy’s standpoint which appeared to one of merely representing local government officials’ views instead of striking a balance between citizens and officials. As reported earlier in Citizen Matters, a writ petition was filed by NGOs Environment Support Group and CIVIC a few months ago against the tree cutting undertaken by the Bruhat Bangalore…

In the earlier parts of this series we have seen as to how in a layout context, the Resident Welfare Association (RWA) is the body that is aware of the issues that the residents face, can engage with the residents to identify appropriate solutions, can build consensus on issues/resolutions and enable the implementation of measures to ensure issue resolution. We have also discussed the relevance of Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) in the layout context, and dealt with FAQ’s on the same. In this article we will see how the RWA can play the role of a 'Resource Manager' for water, assuming…

I had heard a lot about the Manchinbelle dam (across the river Arkavathy) from fellow photographer friends and it appeared at the top of my interest list for the weekend. Trip To: Manchinbelle DamFree Add-On: Big Banyan tree, Naga TempleDistance: 40 Kms.Trip directions: From Bangalore city, drive down Mysore Road and turn right at Rajeshwari Dental College. The road will take you directly to the Big Banyan tree and then continue to Manchinbelle Dam. The road is a great all through but the last few kms to the road promise to be bumpy.. EXPERIENCEAs the drive from the Rajeshwari dental…

The first two parts of this series dealt with arriving at a broad layout-level strategy for rainwater harvesting (RWH) and how to engage the residents and decision-making bodies of the layout to move the strategy forward. When engaging with residents, one will inevitably face many questions about why people should consider rainwater harvesting (RWH), how the systems are constructed and how they work. The following discussion concentrates on how to address these FAQs, first focusing on general RWH questions and then on more technical questions related to RWH for direct storage and groundwater recharge. Rainwater Clubrainwaterclub [at] gmail [dot] com1022,…

If Rs.11.2 lakhs is the value of one tree, imagine how much the football-fields worth of trees that are razed to the ground everyday are worth - the mangroves, the forests, and all those that cannot be accounted for.... Oct 18th: A tree-lover seems impervious to the pain inflicted on this notice-bearing tree on Dickenson Road. Pic: Shivani Shah. "People keep talking about opening more wilderness for development. We seem to understand the value of oil, timber, minerals and housing, but not the value of unspoiled beauty, wildlife, solitude, and spiritual renewal. We need to start putting prices on the…

The High Court of Karnataka on Tuesday, 4th November directed the Lake Development Authority (LDA) not to enter into fresh agreements enabling private parties to own lakes. A division of the HC bench, comprising Chief Justice PD Dinakaran and Justice VG Sabhapathi, took the State government to task, observing that the government was trying to commercialise lakes by handing them over to the private parties.The Court directed the government and the LDA to take a decision regarding steps to be taken to protect lakes and gardens, to preserve the beauty of cities and maintain ecological balance. It has given two…

In Part 1 of this series, we touched on the crucial first steps to implementing rainwater harvesting (RWH) in a layout - asking yourself why the layout should implement RWH, what implementation strategies make sense in your layout, and consulting with someone with RWH technical capacity to assist with conception, design and implementation. This part focuses on the human dimension of implementing RWH at a collective level. As we saw in Part 1, the two RWH implementation strategies for a layout are household collection for domestic use, and collection from households and common areas for groundwater recharge. To implement either…