Pollution - Question of Cities

Focused on flood management, Mumbai lets down Mithi River ecologically

Twenty years after the July 2005 deluge in Mumbai, the Mithi, pivotal to drain the rain, is still choked, silted and disconnected from the city despite thousands of crores spent to clean it, build embankment walls and sewage treatment plants.…

Why Kolkata should be a celebration of the Hooghly but isn’t

The iconic river, immortalised in cinema, songs and art, hardly has a happy relationship with the city. Visible for barely 1.5 kilometres, its banks and the ghats have garbage, debris, faecal matter, crumbling structures of the British era, derelict factories.…

Rivers are our home (but) what will the waters remember – plastic?

“The Mithi,” wrote the legendary poet Eunice D’souza, “will carry you on a raft of garbage to a dying sea.” As rivers in our cities turn into receptacles of waste and victims of poor planning, the loss of what they…

‘Give the river back its space. Give it a new spatial
role in a city’

São Paulo and Mumbai are similar in that the cities have seen massive urbanisation at the cost of rivers. The Tietê and Pinheiros rivers, in the Brazilian city, and the Mithi in Mumbai are choked by myopic policies and apathy.…

Why cities must reconnect with their rivers, renew river-people relationship

Rivers are slowly being erased from people’s lives and imagination in cities. Seen as water sources, as dumping yards for waste, and their floodplains as developable land, they remain disconnected from the rhythms of urban life. Rivers are, can be,…

Vrishabhavathi: A river’s struggle in Bengaluru’s landscape

Our imagination of rivers often contrasts with what we see in our cities. They are integrated into urban systems as stormwater drains, overlaid with sewage lines, carry domestic waste, and in the case of Vrishabhavathi River, become an outlet for…

To rekindle Delhi’s relationship with the Yamuna, clean it up

The Yamuna has been Delhi’s lifeline for centuries but the city now has a severed, mostly utilitarian, relationship with it. Only two percent of the Yamuna flows through Delhi but the city is responsible for 76 percent of its pollution…

‘Rivers have emotions, like human beings. Their waters rise’

As the plan to develop the Mula-Mutha riverfront in Pune gathers momentum, many residents and environmental activists believe it’s a death knell for the river. Architect Sarang Yadwadkar, among those in the forefront resisting the project, thinks that Pune may…

International tourist hotspots, hit by protests, seek to reduce footfalls

Overtourism in some of the world's most popular destinations such as Barcelona, Mallorca, Venice, and Bali has led to a series of protests this month and local administrations were pushed to impose restrictions. Hordes of tourists have brought profits to…

Climate language: How to bridge the gap with local, people-centric communication

The languages, forms and methods used to communicate climate change often fail to connect policy and official reports with people’s lived experiences. Climate communication excludes the very people it affects the most. For it to make a difference, it must…