Child I met Kavitha, a chirpy girl with a winning smile, on the first day of the dropout survey carried out by volunteers of Child Rights and You. “School hogthira?” I asked, “Do you go to school?” She looked up and nodded, half-yes, half-no, then shyly turned away. “Tamil teriyuma?” I egged on. It turned outContinueContinue reading “How can we get school dropouts to go back?”
Category Archives: City
Contract pourakarmikas’ fight for equal pay – a timeline of events
For over a year now, contract sanitary workers in Bengaluru have been waging a sustained fight against the contractor mafia which runs solid waste management in Bengaluru.
An education lost, a livelihood gained?
While the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986 prohibits children working up to the age of 14, it is silent on the case of those in the 14 to 18 age group who are on the threshold of adulthood.
Rainwater harvesting in less than a tenth of households
Eight years after rainwater harvesting was made mandatory in Bengaluru, the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board has implemented it in just 72,000 households. This is far less than the number of possible sites as the BWSSB has installed 9.4 lakh water connections in the city. The law on rainwater harvesting applied to all new structures (afterContinueContinue reading “Rainwater harvesting in less than a tenth of households”
City council misses window to set up RWH systems in its parks
At a time when water shortage is on everyone’s minds and “water councils” are being held by the civic body to discuss how to ameliorate the situation, one would expect the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) to do everything in its capacity to conserve water. However, the civic body missed a good window to conserveContinueContinue reading “City council misses window to set up RWH systems in its parks”
A sure-shot way to get people to segregate waste?
How do you get recalcitrant residents to segregate their waste? A team of waste collectors and design students seem to have hit upon a scalable solution. Using a mobile app, waste collectors geotagged 250 households and rated the level of segregation. Within three months, more than three-fourths of the 250 households had achieved 100% segregationContinueContinue reading “A sure-shot way to get people to segregate waste?”
Four years on, Ejipura residents await their promised houses
The EWS Colony in Ejipura was demolished by the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) in January 2013, and nothing has changed for the 900-odd families who are still waiting for their houses. While many have shifted to the city outskirts, 22 families continue to live on the pavement near the fenced-off land. According to anContinueContinue reading “Four years on, Ejipura residents await their promised houses”
‘When we ask for our passbooks, they threaten to throw us out’
Twenty-four-year old Shanti looked at the calculator perplexed. According to the trade unionist standing before her, who had just computed her wage break-up, she was supposed to be earning Rs. 17,440 a month as a contract pourakarmika under the city corporation, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP). “Rs. 17,000, not Rs. 1,700?” she asks to confirm.ContinueContinue reading “‘When we ask for our passbooks, they threaten to throw us out’”
The Animation Instinct
In barely a few years, Bengaluru has seen a spurt in the number of animation studios based in the city. The number of studios has gone up from just a handful less than a decade ago to nearly 50 today, say industry experts. A 2015 National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) study onContinueContinue reading “The Animation Instinct”
Marketing strategy for deep tech companies 