Team QoC - Question of Cities

‘What’s the strategic component in Great Nicobar? The logic is entirely financial’

The dense forest of 130 square kilometres in the Great Nicobar, an area equivalent to 38 percent of Mumbai, faces total erasure by a Rs 92,000-crore mega development project of a transshipment terminal, port and airport. “We are signing off…

Do not touch our trees: Citizens echo across cities

From Pune to Hyderabad, citizens are protesting large-scale tree cutting linked to roads, metros, flyovers, mining and real estate projects despite worsening urban heat. In Pune, activists say decades of infrastructure-led concretisation have devastated tree cover, even as the city…

Paris shows the cool way to prioritise nature over concrete

Paris went from grey car-centric to green and tree-filled, planting nearly 1,00,000 trees and creating 531 gardens, and two urban forests with Mayor Anne Hidalgo leading the transformation. To make the city more liveable and breathable, and to reduce excessive…

‘People being picked up and cases slapped; who listens
to the poor?’

It has been around three weeks that tens of protesting workers from Manesar and Noida were arrested. Their demands were basic – revision of minimum wages, improved working conditions, double pay for overtime, mandatory weekly offs, medical coverage, and timely…

The great AI debate: Taking all jobs, some jobs or being used as cover for layoffs?

Artificial Intelligence may not be the only factor for the restructuring seen in work and job markets, but it cannot be overlooked that it is drastically changing the way people work. Generative AI is reshaping, not uniformly erasing, white-collar work,…

‘Riverfront development is the murder of rivers, turning rivers into drains.’

“The Aravari taught me to flow like water,” says Dr Rajendra Singh, renowned water conservationist, in this interview, explaining how the work of turning it perennial influenced his life’s work and methods. Riverfront development, now unfolding across India’s cities, is…

Nuts, bolts, and budgets of riverfront development

Riverfront development has rapidly become a defining feature of cities across India, with projects underway in cities from Ahmedabad to Guwahati and Hyderabad and more. Framed as efforts to “revitalise” rivers, these projects have largely followed a standardised template, set…

Determined voices continue to fight for rights, land, ecology

Against all odds, average Indians are pushing back against projects that threaten their livelihoods and environment, or raise their voice to demand rights and justice. Fisherfolk, Adivasis and farmers from Palghar intensified their protest against the proposed Vadhavan port, an…

‘There comes a tipping point when people say enough
is enough’

In the past few years, Dehradun went from being a salubrious hill city to having summer temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius, floods and landslides. Thousands of trees were felled for massive infrastructure projects. Locals call this large-scale devastation of nature…

‘Rivers are not meant to die because of our mistakes’

The Musi could have been the defining characteristic of Hyderabad, the cyber city, as it was in history when it filled over 3,000 lakes, had 22 flood diversion channels, 14 public parks, and places of learning and social life along…