Idling under the Neem Tree

  By Malini Shankar  Digital Discourse Foundation  Scorching the Earth that is what GBA is likely to do to Bangalore. Greater Bangalore Authority (GBA) is a newly notified Administrative organization / administrative cell set up with a mandate to administer urban subdivisions to be carved from several rural parts of what is now Bangalore rural district and will further carve out many areas of neighbouring districts. GBA will sprawl over 712 2  kilometres with a local population of over 1.3 crores. This will provide opportunity for development of satellite towns, but will ruin Bangalore City as we know it today. The Garden City will morph into a large hideous hydra headed unaesthetic Central Business District. Malls, Multi storeyed buildings devoid of FSR conformation will make the city’s skyline an asymmetric concrete jungle with botched and mismatched land use planning. FSR? These structures will not have cross ventilation or wide windows. These structures w...

 Bangalore is quintessentially green. If we lose the green cover its scorching the Mother Earth By Malini Shankar Digital Discourse Foundation The prospective “tunnel road project” for Bangalore – meant to serve the ‘high speed needs’ of the Electronics City employees exclusively, so that they get a smooth ride from pristine Bangalore to Electronics City which they assume to have a right to pollute and render a gas chamber is earmarked to cleave Lalbagh Bengaluru’s green lung and green pride - is the new source of conflict and tension for the native denizens of the Garden City who grew up on misty mornings and foggy cloudy summers.   These busy bodies who work addicted to Whatsapp pretend success in every breathe and reminds one of that psychotherapist who was so busy counselling a quarrelling couple from 5.00a.m. that she did not have time to attend to her own ailing mother. One native of cold n misty Sakleshpur in Hassan district tells me that the December chills in ...

  Idling under the Neem Tree By Malini Shankar Digital Discourse Foundation While the transition from Bangalore Municipal Corporation or Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike to Greater Bangalore Authority has grabbed headlines, the transition has not been fantastic in the less glamorous areas: servers, officers and their terms of reference…Worse there is still no will to set right the mess created by lack of discipline in solid waste management. Standardised packaging ware? Being the avant garde city that Bengaluru is, - reputed to be the Silicon city its administrators and politicians have not shown either the will or political support in introducing standards in manufacture and packaging material itself. Standardised packaging ware will make a huge reduction in waste generation as it conforms to recyclable standards. No protocols defined, much less monitored in supplanting trees that are felled in urban areas for “development”. Before you know it Bangalore / Bengaluru will be shea...

By Malini Shankar  Digital Discourse Foundation   So, ... since it is December we might as well reflect on the one more year that slips into history of our own lives... Another World Handicapped Day has whizzed past us. There is still no public representative nominated to the Upper House of Indian Parliament to represent the interests of the differently abled persons for policy formulation. A ramp is there... but to serve only the needs of the Union Railway Minister.  Indian Railways has still not introduced wheelchair compatible ramps for the benefit of differently abled passengers... We have such a yawning gap in the public sphere in India to fulfill the needs of differently abled persons.  How many of us have stopped ourselves short of bribing a clerk at a government office in the month of December 2025? I can count myself in.  How many of us have continued to do our exercise and diet regimen in December that we so valiantly resolved at the start of the year?...