Governance

“I’m 94 years and six months old,” emphasises Kamakshi Subramaniyan, who is busy preparing for her election campaign. Yes, the nonagenarian has filed her nominations for the upcoming local body polls for the post of corporation councillor. She will be contesting from ward 174, comprised of Besant Nagar and Adyar areas of Chennai. Known fondly as Kamakshi paati among the locals of Chennai, she is also the co-founder of SPARK, a civic forum, started in 2012 with the aim of helping the citizens of the city to tackle civic problems. SPARK helps Chennaiites by guiding them in approaching the right…

Residents of the NCR town of Ghaziabad, which is part of poll-bound Uttar Pradesh, have learnt one important lesson in recent years. That public health is an issue that residents have to solve for themselves through their RWAs, or other people’s associations. There was a distant hope, in vain as it turned out, that the new budget would at least mention public health, especially in the poll bound states. Not surprisingly, even though polling in this assembly segment is on February 10th, no poll manifesto as yet has promised anything that will improve the environment for better health. Administered by…

On February 3rd, India's richest civic body, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC)'s commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal unveiled the civic budget for the financial year 2022-23. The budget for this year is a whopping Rs 45,949.21 crore, a 17.70% jump from the previous year (Rs 39,038.83 crore). The focus of this year's allocation is on health, infrastructure and education. We've highlighted key points from the budget announcement. Big developmental projects Rs 3,200 crore for the Mumbai Coastal Road project Rs 1,300 crore for the Goregaon Mukund Rail projectNew security systems like Boom Barrier and Hand Metal Detectors to be installed at…

The constitutional right to vote has been the cornerstone of India’s democratic foundation. In a country as diverse, with 900 million registered voters in 2019 as per Election Commission figures, the model for exercising universal adult franchise has often been applauded. But the model remains beset with a set of unique challenges. One such long-standing challenge is checking duplicate entries in the country's electoral rolls. To address this issue, the union government has now proposed linking of the Aadhaar and the voter ID, as represented by the Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC). The proposal immediately evoked strong criticism and raised…

On Wednesday, January 26th, Tamil Nadu State Election Commissioner, V Palanikumar announced that elections to various urban local bodies across the state will be held on February 19 and the date for counting of the votes as February 22. This announcement comes a day after the Madras High Court gave the green signal to go ahead with the polls, in response to a Public Interest Litigation filed in the court, asking for local body elections to be deferred owing to the COVID-19 situation in the state. Rejecting the plea, a bench consisting of acting Chief Justice MN Bhandari and Justice…

Let’s face it – our city ­administration has done a magnificent job over the last two years trying to keep the pandemic within control. We have emerged better than some other metropolises though that does not mean we have been exemplary. But yes, we can commend our performance. Which is why, in the light of all this, we did seem to detect something of a flap in the last two weeks before matters righted themselves once more. Of course, with numbers continuing to rise we need to watch the ground situation more closely. And in that, perhaps we can avoid…

Citizens from different wards of Bengaluru were joined by those across the country to participate in Janaagraha’s #CityPolitics webinar, titled ‘MyCityMyBudget Phase 2 – Are Ward Committees using budget allocated to them’, on Saturday, January 22nd. The webinar discussed how Bengaluru’s ward committees have been utilising the budget allocated to them. Last August, BBMP set precedent by allotting Rs 60 lakh to each of its 198 ward committees. The decision was taken after over 9,000 citizens submitted inputs on how ward budgets need to be spent, in response to the #MyCityMyBudget (MCMB) campaign (jointly launched by BBMP and the NGO…

Every year, like clockwork, Mumbai floods after excessive rains that bring the city to a standstill, leaving behind severe damages to infrastructure, and throwing up new challenges for the city administrators to handle. This despite substantial annual budgets sanctioned for desilting storm water drains and attempts to rejuvenate rivers, including Mithi. So predictable and perennial is Mumbai’s experience with flooding, that political parties had included specific promises in their 2017 BMP poll manifestos to tackle the issue. However, five years down the line, as they face the electorate again in 2022, the ground reality is that the promises have remained…

Despite the dangers they pose to life and limb, Indians have learned to live with the potholes that abound in most roads in every city. According to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, potholes accounted for 3,564 road accidents in 2020, though the the exact number of deaths from these accidents is not known. But despite these appalling numbers, there is a complete lack of explicit or specific legislation dealing with accountability for deaths or injuries caused by potholes that are the result of poor quality work and lack of maintenance by the municipal authorities concerned. Can government or…

Policy making on public health issues requires data of many kinds. One such important data category is the number of birth and death registrations. For instance, the changes in birth registration allowed researchers to note the drastic drop in Karnataka’s fertility rate over the past 40 years. On the other hand, death registration has played a key role in identifying health trends in the state, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. For citizens, birth and death certificates impact everything from admission into schools to entitlements like pension and other benefits. But what are the steps for registering and receiving birth/death certificates…