Ankita Dhar Karmakar - Question of Cities

Night heat: The silent crisis of summer for the marginalised

Rising night temperatures are playing havoc with people’s lives in cities. In Delhi’s Seemapuri, a colony of waste pickers, unusually warm nights compound the day’s heat stress. Mumbai and Chennai have unusually warm nights too. The burden of rising night…

Call it a forest or not, Dwarka matters beyond the definition

Between the Dwarka forest and the road outside, there was a staggering difference of 17 to 21 degrees Celsius on the thermal camera, underscoring the need for trees. But Dwarka was not legally tagged a forest and did not appear…

India’s war on trees

How many hundreds or thousands of trees have been chopped down across India, where has the tree-felling been, and what would the destruction look like on a map? Researching, collating and analysing the answers to these and related questions led…

Unfair, unjust work: The
nine-hour ordeal of a woman delivery rider

In the estimated 7.7 million workers in the gig economy in 2020-21, women make between 10-28 percent of the workforce. Question of Cities shadows Zomato delivery rider, Lata, on Delhi’s roads to map their lives. The earnings are as little…

How India’s cities are making protests invisible

Across Indian cities, protests are being confined to designated sites with strict rules, making them easy to be ignored and disengaging protesters from the public as well as governments. In Delhi, Jantar Mantar is now the designated protest site –…

New battle in Panipat as refinery workers rise

Nearly 30,000 workers of the Indian Oil Corporation Limited refinery in Panipat, among India’s largest refineries, went on a sit-in protest in February. They demanded the global standard of an 8-hour shift, salary payments on time, accountability from the company…

Delhi owes the Yamuna an ecologically-sound river-led city plan

The deterioration and shrinking of the Yamuna in Delhi have worsened over the decades despite thousands of crores spent. Constructions on its floodplains were ignored earlier; now, the Yamuna Action Plan itself includes riverfront development with concretisation even as long-time…

‘The government got votes from here, now claims the settlement is illegal’

What happens when a river’s relationships with people closest to it are broken and all talk of the river is reduced to drains and development, barrages and budgets? The people are invisibilised like the forgotten farmers and evicted slum dwellers…

Split or reunified, Delhi’s municipal corporation has poor governance, low finances

Urban governance in the national capital has been through different formats, explains multimedia journalist Ankita Dhar Karmakar. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi was split into three in 2011, on the basis of reports, to decentralise and facilitate development. But the…

Following the arc from the Aravallis to Delhi’s air

The need of the hour is to recognise Delhi’s rising air pollution from an integrated ecological perspective. Indeed, various anti-pollution measures of the past years must continue – and be implemented more seriously – but the acute crisis demands more.…