Movements - Question of Cities

Placing platform workers in the city’s urban imagination

The city is the place of work for millions of platform or gig workers in India who number an astounding 7.7 million in official records but could well be three times that. Yet, the relationship between them and the city…

South Asian domestic worker abuse and activism in New York

This insightful and evocative paper, presented as senior thesis at Columbia University’s Department of History, traces the arc of the exploitation and…

‘Deep flaw or blind spot in Indian environmentalism is that it largely ignored cities’

Cities built at the cost of ecology are becoming uninhabitable and unsustainable. Between the Gandhian perspective which is hostile to city life…

Feminism meets environmentalism but women left out of decision-making

As women, across barriers of caste and class and other social indices, assert themselves, they also touch upon environmental issues that are…

Reading Guha: India’s environmental history that’s “partially usable”

India’s environmentalism did not start with the Chipko movement, says historian and author Ramachandra Guha. His latest book Speaking with Nature –…

Resistance, confrontation,
anti-extractivist struggles in the Global South

Rising heat waves, illegal mining, degradation of water bodies and depletion of trees are increasing across the world, especially in countries of…

What enraged us and what gladdened us in 2024: An overview

When we look back at the year fast closing upon us all, there was not much to cheer about how our cities…

‘Waste pickers are treated like step-children but the formal sector can’t work without them’

Most of Bengaluru’s waste used to be dumped in the villages nearby and waste pickers invisibilised despite their critical role. Hasiru Dala has been working to organise them, get government identity cards for them, and make them stakeholders in the…

We, the people, must fight to save our cities and ourselves

Governments and authorities are the custodians of our ecology but, in the past few years, people have resisted and protested actions of…

Jal Satyagraha: From water conversations to water conservation and justice

Drawn from the ‘swaraj through satyagraha’ concept of India’s independence movement, the struggle for water access and equity has spread across rural…