Society

How has Bengaluru city's sweeping transformation over the last 30 years impacted its street-based sex workers? Bengaluru, which has no specific red light area, has hosted a vast landscape for street-based sex work – a category of informal labour that is not strictly illegal, but is considered undesirable and in urgent need of rescue and rehabilitation. However, in the last three decades, the meaning of ‘public space’ has undergone a dramatic change in Bengaluru, alongside the definition of who ought to legitimately constitute the ‘public’ or 'desirable worker'. Consequently, an entire ecology around street-based sex work has slowly disintegrated, pushing…

‘Decoding Everyday’ is a citizen science portal which invites contributions from individual residents, student communities, RWA members and anyone interested to share their experiences and stories about streets and public spaces in cities. It is an initiative of the Bangalore-based Everyday City Lab (ECL) that was recently selected to be a part of the Citizen Innovation Lab’s (CIL) ‘Six-week Sprint’ within its Civic Tech program. Under this program, CIL supports initiatives to develop technologies that enable citizens to engage with the government and/or communities to work towards civic participation in governance. The Everyday City Lab recently launched a series of…

To register a marriage in Mumbai, the Maharashtra Regulation of Marriage Bureaus and Registration of Marriages Act, 1998 governs marriages in Maharashtra. There are other Acts, specific to religions, like The Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act, 1936 and the Indian Christian Marriage Act, 1972. For inter-faith partnerships, the Special Marriage Act, 1954 is available to those who go in for inter-faith or inter-caste marriage or generally for standard Court marriages without any emphasis on personal beliefs. What is the eligibility criteria for a couple to get married? Men above 21 years of age and women above 18 years of age…

Come the first signs of winter and 50-year-old Saleema, a resident of Panthachowk area of Srinagar, visits her 10-acre orchard for two hours daily to collect fallen leaves of the different variety of trees there. She also cuts small tree branches to keep with the leaves. Saleema along with her two daughters, Sab 15 and Iqra 13, then begin the process to turn the leaves and tree branches collected into a kind of coal to be used in fire-pots, popularly known as Kangris, a traditional heating pot which Kashmiris use to fight the bone chilling winter cold. Thanks to the…

This is the second of a two-part story looking at how women construction workers are disproportionately affected by air pollution and other work place related issues. Read Part I here Women workers in the construction sector, whom the Mahila Housing Trust spoke to in connection with a report they are working on, said they preferred construction work over other occupations for a variety of reasons, one being the higher daily wage rates it offers as compared to other occupations. According to a woman construction worker from Bakkarwala, “we prefer to work at construction sites since we get a daily wage…

This is the first of a two part story looking at how women workers in the construction industry are disproportionately affected by air pollution and other work place related issues. Women workers in the construction sector, the second largest employer of women after agriculture, are disproportionately affected by issues like air pollution. Not only at their work place but also at their homes. Many women construction workers suffer from illnesses like breathlessness but delay treatment due to the lack of options before them. “There have been no studies carried out about the health impact of construction activities on the workers,”…

As the entire world saw an upsurge in the number of COVID-19 cases during the first and second waves, the necessity for credible information was paramount. In March 2020, I started Covid19Chennai on Instagram and Twitter (rebranded as News of Chennai in 2021) to publish cross-verifiable, fact-checked information such as important helplines, home-based food providers, where to get tested, what to do if someone tests positive and curated FAQs related to COVID-19 from reliable news agencies.  This also gave me an idea to create chennaicovidhelp.in — a web app where all information would be collated. The advantage of a web…

The last days of 2021 saw the city’s famed Marina Beach become accessible for all for a short period of time with a temporary pathway. Promises have been made to make such public spaces more inclusive in 2022. Here is a look at how the past year has been for the disability rights movement and what we would like to see for the city going forward. The effect of the pandemic The pandemic really brought to fore some of the things that disabled people have been requesting as reasonable accommodations, such as work from home and teleconferencing. If a person…

“Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat them”. So wrote Winston Churchill. A chillingly apt truth those in charge of urban governance in India need to learn today. Many lessons of 2020 — public health and livelihoods to name two — went unlearnt. The same lessons and some new ones came to the fore in 2021, especially the images of people running helter-skelter and paying exorbitant prices for that precious cylinder of life-giving oxygen as wave two of COVID ran amok. For me, the sight of students slowly trooping back to schools and colleges was among the…

Translated by Sandhya Raju அக்டோபர் 2017 ஆம் ஆண்டு, 22 வயதான நரேன் பரத்வாஜ் கேளம்பாக்கத்தில் உள்ள இந்துஸ்தான் கல்லூரி அருகே இரவு 8 மணியளவில் நடந்து சென்று கொண்டிருந்தபோது, ​​பைக்கில் வந்த இருவர் அவரது போனை பறித்துச் சென்றனர். கொள்ளையடிக்கும் முன்பே அந்த இடத்தில், காவல்துறை இருந்து, அவர்களை பிடிப்பதை கற்பனை செய்து பாருங்கள். இது ஒன்றும் திரைக்கதை அமைப்பு அல்ல, உண்மையிலேயே இது சாத்தியப்படக்கூடும் என சமீபத்தில் வெளிவந்த கிரிமினாலஜி ஆய்வு தெரிவிக்கிறது. சென்னையில் நடக்கும் குற்றங்கள் மற்றும் வழிப்பறி சம்பவங்கள் குறித்து ஆய்வு செய்து வரும் ஆய்வாளர்கள், அடுத்த குற்றத்தின் இடத்தை கணிக்க முடிந்தால், குற்றவாளிகளை அந்த இடத்திலேயே கைது செய்ய முடியும் என கூறுகின்றனர் - அதிர்ஷ்டத்தாலோ ஜோதிட கணிப்பாலோ அல்ல, குற்ற செயல் வடிவமைப்பு வைத்து இது சாத்தியம். மே 2021 இல், சென்னையில் நடந்த குற்றவியல் முறைகளை ஆராய்ந்த பின்னர், ‘சென்னை…