Environment - Question of Cities

‘Climate solutions should be grounded in human rights, equality, and participation of worst hit’

Climate change is a human rights issue too, as judgments in India and abroad recently underscored. This recognises that not all people are equally affected by climate-related events in countries or cities. The marginalised, women and girls, informal and outdoor…

Reading the Supreme Court judgment on the Right to Life and climate change

In a judgment that flew below the radar, the Supreme Court of India brought the impact of climate change into sharp focus. The case was about the Great Indian Bustard but the apex court articulated a powerful idea in the…

How Punekars fought for their hill, Vetal Tekdi, to save its ecology

Pune’s citizens have been fighting to save Vetal Tekdi, the city’s lungs and a popular open space, from being destroyed for developmental projects. Realising the importance of nature in a rapidly expanding city, a coalition of citizens and groups have…

Linear parks: Adding value to urban landscape

Seamless stretches of green space and blue water courses, opening up possibilities and amenities for the public, are significant characteristics of a healthy and liveable city. The green stretches may well be linear parks threading various neighbourhoods, creating accessible and…

From nature in cities to imagining cities in nature, for our future

Nature shapes and defines cities, but the prevailing model of city-making equates development with construction at the cost of ecology, purely for profit. This has led to a serious rupture in nature and segregation of nature from people. As the…

What Shimla’s construction in defiance of its mountain ecology means

Over half of Shimla, the hill station from the British era that is still popular among tourists, has been officially classified as moderately prone and 33 percent of it highly prone to landslides. The brunt of landslides is borne by…

Portraits of Bengaluru neighbourhoods struggling without water

The modest and low-income neighbourhood of Krishnaiyyanapalya in East Bengaluru exemplifies domestic life in the face of acute water shortage. With their one-hour-a-day supply from the Cauvery ebbing this year, residents are forced to rely on tankers and tractors. This…

For five pots of water a day, women of Vyasarpadi mortgage lives and health

Chennai’s water distribution network is lopsided. Its northern areas like Vyasarpadi, with poorer and backward caste households, are neglected. Here, women’s daily gruelling routines revolve around water. Older women, young working women, college and school-going girls queue up for water…

Mumbai’s unquenchable thirst: Overestimating water demand to justify dams

Water to the city has been supplied from seven dams, constructed in the neighbouring rural and forested areas, at great socio-economic and environmental costs. More such capital-intensive projects are being planned. But does Mumbai really need these projects? The answer,…

Saving Rani Bagh with women’s power and collaborative campaigns

Women from diverse backgrounds joined hands to save one of Mumbai’s oldest green spaces and botanical garden, Rani Bagh, from construction. Their painstaking and tedious paperwork, awareness campaigns, audio-visual presentations, RTI applications, and archival information gradually ensured that the Brihanmumbai…