I find it difficult to be moved in such moments ( the recent death of Jane Goodall) and feel even more unmoved to the gush of public emotions that I see. She did great work, in the impressionable years I would with excitement follow her work – not at the same level as few others but still admired her. I took inspiration but I wanted to make a difference, and had specific plans and then got on with the job at hand.
But now whether it is her or David Attenborough who left an order of magnitude more impact than her I am just completely disconnected. I feel positively irritated when I hear the voice of Attenborough now. Not because of him but because of the phenomenon around him.
The only thing which catches my attention (and with bewilderment) more than their living or passing away is that there are so many people who are interested in matters of preserving forests, species and the general environment. I did not know.
Because in the my living time on the planet I have been closely involved with environmental issues, among them saving forests and species and the single big difficulty I see is not having sufficient number of people take interest. Not just in the work I do but also in the work of others.
I keep getting reminded of those two young colleagues more than a decade back who would trip on every new inspiring TED video uploaded. At one time I had to tell them that too much inspiration without commensurate action is like too much sugar without exercise.
I got into sharing a recent conversation on city matters with my mother and one of the things I shared was my anguish at the disemboweling of BEST – Mumbai’s public bus service – in the past decade.
Not the conversation for technical details, she jumped in with immediately recollecting her instances from the 1970s and 80s. Marriage brought my mother to the city in 1974 at the tender age of 20. The people she met, the conversations and sights left an indelible print on her mind, which lightens up and plays in conversations like these.
One of the names that came to her mind was late Mayank Zaveri (or Jhaveri), or Mayank bhai as we call him. She recollected how Mayank bhai, a prominent diamond merchant would take nothing but the BEST bus from in front of his house to travel to Grant Road station or anywhere around.
But how did Mayank bhai come into our life? Through BEST of course. My father sometime in 1983 or 1984 met him in a BEST ride. He had started a fledging business which had seen his unrecognized latent talent boom. He was carrying a piece of furniture, a mirror frame or a jaali, with exquisite carving to be delivered at Nepean Sea Road or Walkeshwar and found Mayank bhai to be travelling in the same bus who was thrilled to see what my dad was carrying. He asked him about his whereabouts, struck a friendship and immediately asked him to show up at his residence – one of the more prominent old heritage houses on Malabar Hill.
From there started a long friendship and some business – but the connection happening on a BEST ride.
There are many other seniors in that age who moved around proudly in BEST, many of them in a position to travel by taxi’s or cars which were hardly as common then. That level of pride in the service is now gone. The service was still being run on British systems and values. Increasingly the take over by vernaculars has led to chaotic vernacular value systems take over. And I mean the IAS and the political class and their extension the middle class – not the drivers or conductors who are victims themselves and the old timers rue the downfall equally.
One of the worst walkable experience close to a Metro station in Mumbai can be experienced within a 500 metre of the DN Nagar Metro station of Line2 or Yellow line. The pictures below show a small stretch from one of the exits of Line 2 (next to Audi showroom). This route on the New Link Road for almost 1 km is the most intensively walked sections during peak hours but at other times as well.
Following points standout for introspection and discussion
While there is much conversation about TOD – Transit Oriented Development among the professional urban planning crowd, the felt experience and actual execution on the ground can be quite poor.
There is a point made that a great walking experience around transit stations will enhance property value and desirability. And that developers will be the ones who will make the effort to ensure better walkability. But on ground on Mumbai there seems to be no such correlation or an effort from developers or residents. Advocacy efforts for walkability can become very difficult if everyone is well adjusted. www.walkingproject.org
There does not seem a working group on TOD in Mumbai, which will ensure that the principles of TOD are actually implemented in road design around Transit stations.
Let us not forget that unnecessary concrete is being poured out. Cement is high carbon emissions. The same causing climate change. We have no means of preventing thousands and maybe millions of tonnes of preventable concrete and hence emissions. We have failed COP talks every year where India argues that it wants to retain its right to develop at all costs. To do this.
This is effectively where pedestrians walk. This is 10 metres from the Metro station The portion of the road being concretised next to the barricade is called the shoulder portion. Notice where the pedestrian is walking.Look at the footpath – not walkable but passes for as a footpath on BMC plans. Half of this concretised portion should have been used for providing space for a walkable footpath. This space will now be completely taken over by a garage in one of the shops and for angular parking and double parking.A TOD influence zone calls for a high quality walking experience with footpaths that should be wider than usual. Look at the footpath in this picture.The space behind the railing.Damage is done. Now creating space for a footpath will be seen as a headache. Where is the thinking on TOD? Just limited to conference presentations. There is no working group on TOD for the 100 more busy public transit nodes in Mumbai
Amit Shah is now riding the proverbial tiger. Indian democracy and peoples fate is now linked to the predicament faced by the one riding the proverbial tiger.
Have environmentalists created the trees and the rivers and air that they so dearly champion for?
Has the one who has created asked them to save the planet? It is this self delusion that leads to loss. That’s why you never see a happy environmentalists. Long and sullen disappointed faces forever loosing.
If they have not created these then what gives them this moralistic zeal and self righteousness that they are doing the right thing?
If Dusshera stands for Victory of Good over Evil then the suffering and continued loss that one sees in environmental activism must suggest something? Suggest that the loosing side is ultimately the wrong side side or evil side.
The very politicians and business leaders they mock see success from one term to another. They are rewarded for being in sync with a divine plan.
The article occupies a whole page and gives the impression that must be a valuable contribution on the subject. But is mostly a rehash of concepts and principles which everyone in the domain understands for more than a decade now and does not see implementation on the ground.
The essence of TOD is walkability, everything else falls in place almost automatically but it is walkability which gets neglected. After reading the article I took more interest on the walking conditions within 100 meters of the two metro stations close by and they are as bad as bad can get. This is after a decade of Line 1 being operational and more than a year of Line 2 being operational. Incidentally when Line 1 opened, WRI had harped on TOD and even did a study of
In the community walks held by Walking Project the few conversations about Bangalore invite scoff and disdain. One of the participants put it well that the city engineers have absolutely no clue what footpaths are and in Mumbai we are just fussing over something
These are all career environmental professionals, not the real community on whose behalf they speak. Outcome and situation on the ground is not a matter of much concern.
Spatial planning in Indian cities is a mess. Now who in the government will take the report and get to what needs to be done? UDRI should know it well from its experience with Mumbai Development Plan 2014-34 with which it was involved. The draft plan was riddled with so many holes that it was a joke. Since then the city has decided to give all planning (spatial or otherwise) a go by and the municipal corporation in Mumbai is now a shop for selling FSI for anyone who can pay a premium. Where is the local area planning? Take a ride in any of the Metros and you can only feel a sense of loss and being cheated after investing so much of your life in developing a city which would ingrain progressive principles to create a city we can cherish.
Sustainability on first principles will question the need for the concert. All of these fans who will show up would also be hearing their favourite songs spread over multiple platforms and devices. Now in person too. Have you seen any such donation of time and resource for resolving pressing community issues? Many people will take flights, stay in hotels and more. All for what? Hear a stale band?
In February I was contacted by Richa Pinto from Times of India for my views on a proposal by BMC and others to shift/remove the hawkers outside Andheri West station. The proposed idea was to create an underground market below Ganpatrao Ambre Garden which is at a distance of 1 km from the station.
Hindustan Times carried a more in depth and broader story on the subject here
I objected to the proposal and a quote was carried to that effect here. My key points of objection were as below.
There is a captive market outside Andheri Railways Station (west) which consists of people entering and exiting the station. It would run into a few lakhs. The hawkers are attracted to the location based on this crowd. The station users in turn are attracted to the hawkers for the same reason, they are served on a plate.
Now there is no such captive market at Ganpatrao Ambre Udyan. It is a full 1 km away from the station.
The main hawkers are not outside the station but on the SV Road section. Market in blue patch in map below. Here they are dense and thick and impede the movement of pedestrians.
No commuter from the station is going to walk a km or even half or take a bus or rickshaw to come and shop for cheap sunglasses, t-shirts, faux leather belts and accessories and perfumes, which form a bulk of the wares.
The garden itself is beautiful in its current form with a number of trees, a pergola, and well kept lawns and a walking track. It is the only such garden in a dense neighbourhood. The process of making an underground market means that the entire garden will be excavated and destroyed and rebuilt sometime later, not over soil but as a cover top on top of a concretised basement.
Till I get a few better images this is an image from the garden. We stopped by the garden during a community walk by Walking Project last year in October.
Close up satellite image of the garden
A better proposal would be to redevelop the already built up part of the land which is right next to Andheri station, represents 100 year old low rise dilapidated structures. These will be up for redevelopment anytime soon and a team of urban planners and architects should unlock its full potential. The old Andheri BMC market itself is a 3 acre parcel and prime for shopping. In comparison the garden is not even a full 1 acre.
The polygons marked in red below are right next to the railway station and total about 7 acres. There can be multilevel markets going up till five stories high. If something underground needs to be built that too can be built very well without any disruption to plants, trees, landscape or an existing garden.
Look at how far Ganpatrao Udyan is and the availability of other land holdings much closer to station.
Today, I ended up reading a small news snippet, which I would have otherwise missed, on page 6. The Guardian Minister Mr. Deepak Kesarkar has been upset with BMC officials on not following through with the proposal and starting work soon.
Times of India, 24th August, 2024
Residents in Andheri need to come together to save this garden irrespective of whether they use it or not. If you agree then leave a comment on the post and share it with others. Join the effort.
Hope the Guardian Minister and the officials will see the reasoning and desist from this proposal.
Much has been going around on social media about some new Waqf Board Committee and attempts to take over properties.
What is a Waqf Board property? Its basically a piece of property, land, house, mansion, palace that an individual or family of Muslim faith has donated to the Waqf Board out of a sense of charity and doing good. They could have sold the project, used the money as an investment or kept in an FD but decided to just give it away. Simple, straightforward. Is it larger than entire land area of Pakistan?
It surprises me to see Waqf Board properties lying derelict and unutilised. It points to the usual mix of ineptitude, lack of character, corruption, which defines everything Indian, Hindu or Muslim, that the Waqf Board does not put these properties to good use.
The Board could be doing so much welfare for the people of India, and Muslims in the lower social economic bracket just by leveraging these properties. There would be no need to see those polio handicapped beggars outside mosques and railway stations at least.
It was only two years ago that I got to know that a large property – lying unused – which was a favourite play area as a child is a Waqf Board property. Donated by a Nawab from Aligarh apparently.
Now, there is another set of properties, which those interested in the recent developments should take note of.
Properties of government employees and politicians and power brokers which have been created through ill gotten money. Basically illegal properties made through corruption. By defrauding Hindus.
Waqf Board properties are above board, accounted for in a register and I presume legal. No such register for properties of politicians.
How and why should Waqf Board properties be of so much concern and the large – and maybe larger – land holdings of corrupt officials and politicians not be of concern?
It is those same politicians who create this kind of development. If you are supporting the narrative, either you are part of the politicians network or you are just naive.
The world is doing great in terms of numerous conveniences and avenues for income and lifestyle improvement but it is also broken in many places. There is large scale environmental damage happening, there are unnecessary wars and suffering for millions when everyone should have been experiencing the vast improvements in the past 100 years.
At the heart of the breakdowns is how people perceive price and value. What they attach value to and will pay and what they do not attach value to and will not pay for.
Funds and resources for waste management solutions should come from exactly the same funding mechanisms which are available for human activities which generate waste.
If a bulk of your city residents are paying for activities which generate waste but do not pay for activities which provide solutions then any solution is a lost cause.
All kind of waste generating and unhealthy activities have the invisible hand of the market supporting them, but those providing solutions to waste and a healthy planet suffer for funds.
What people pay for is all that matters, all else is hot air. Generally hot air is all that is available for environmental programs.
The education system is a huge failure when it comes to the kinds of topics in discussion in this post.
Humanity is grappling with the crisis and havoc of environmental pollution. Large quantities of solid and liquid waste is being generated by the hour and disposed of in unscientific, irresponsible and highly damaging ways.
The crisis is such that children born today will see more waste than nature by the time they reach adulthood. We keep hearing about how there is already more plastic than fish in the oceans. But who really is concerned?
Should those who produce children be concerned about what planet their children will inherit or unrelated environmentalists who will never even end up interacting with those children?
Have people/humans/consumers evolved to the level required to be responsible for the waste they generate?
Some people are emotionally moved and find themselves not being able to do anything but worry about this state of affairs. Some of them then get down to developing innovative solutions to waste management. I am one of them.
As part of my work I interact with others in the field and hear frustrating stories from some of these people. Lack of funding and not being able to pay salaries for the key human resource is among the top challenges. Dealing with the government and policies is the other one.
And so recently I developed the Pastry Index of Human Evolution. Where do you stand? Is a clean environment a need or a want? Or none? Its only pastry all the way?
How much pastry, how much substance are you?
I ordered these two pastries through online delivery a week back. I generally do not order online and hardly consume pastry now.
What you see is a concoction of refined flour, refined sugar and refined oil, elegantly held together in a cup made from refined crude oil.
As is always the case and part of spirituality practice I spend some time with the packaging in silence. I noticed on the cardboard flaps “Now delivering from” and between both the flaps there were about 20 locations that this brand was delivering from.
Its a popular cakeshop, started in my neighbourhood 20 years back with a single outlet and then clearly had a lot of sales and popularity to grow from 1 to 20.
I got thinking.
Its six years now that I came up with the innovative and effective solution to handle the scourge of pollution from multi-layered packaging waste – commonly understood as wrappers. We launched the Safai Bank of India program after tasting full success in a pilot run in Gurugram in May 2018. See the video here. Check the images here.
But funding was a challenge right away. We had demonstrated a solution to divert millions of wrappers in a clean condition while also instilling the right values and behaviour change in lakhs of young citizens early on in schools.
Doing all this requires resources. You need a CEO and program managers and coordinators who engage teachers and schools on a daily basis, organise collections, do online communications, events and more.
This is where the Pastry Index of Human Evolution comes in.
What magic mechanism is it, which provides all the resources for a pastry shop selling unhealthy food to go from 1 to 20 in Mumbai? There are others going from 1 to 100 as well. Millions of willing individuals saying, yes we will pay you a certain amount of money to sell me this deadly concoction.
Should that same mechanism not be available for ventures like Safai Bank of India? Why should I be writing grant applications and CSR proposals while the pastry shop owner has to only manage the initial capital and subsequently is taken care of by the residents of the city?
The Pastry Index basically says that human evolution is all about how many pastry worth of willing contributions does an individual make in a year towards any entity which manages plastic waste. One pastry equivalent with be Rs. 150. How many people will utilise a payment facility provided by a waste management initiative like this. If a city cannot even generate Rs. 25 lakhs per annum through the invisible hand then what good is it? The Pastry Index accurately shows the character of a community.
On a daily basis people are consuming with gusto, there are online orders, impulse purchases, gifts, retail therapy and more. Money is continuously leaving wallets and this circulation of capital is the GDP. Should there not be a few people among these millions who want to use their wallet for a cleaner planet?
If the average individual is only seeing the city as a place for income and lifestyle unbothered and untouched by the condition of his city then what does it say about human evolution?
Real change will come about only when the same market mechanisms which fuel unhealthy products and behaviors also support corrective action. When millions of individuals who pay Rs. 150 towards a pastry will also once in a while pay Rs. 150 to an entity managing directly the waste generated by them or indirectly.
In the Safai Bank of India program we must have easily touched the lives of 10,000 urban and rural children. Even those children or their parents could have contributed Rs. 150 a year to support the program. It is their waste which we are diverting after all. But none.
Change will not come about my the multitude of shallow initiatives that I see around funded by corporates or some common funding mechanisms. It will not come about by exercises like COP and the Global Plastics Treaty and more. These can only provide good salary paying options for those who hang out here without any outcome on the ground.
Do leave your thoughts and introspect on where you stand on the Pastry Index.
Yesterday was a “Trevor Noah. Who?” moment for me as I followed this persons Bangalore visit and the fiasco around it on Twitter. Angry feeds showed up with a lot of traction.
Yes, the @Trevornoah show in Bangalore got cancelled. Yes, Bangalore traffic sucks. But these two facts are not directly linked to each other. Guess who can't get away lightly – the organisers, @bookmyshow Here's why…
I recognise the face and know that he does comedy but haven’t consumed any of his shows and was surprised to see that people are willing to pay Rs. 3000-12500 for a ticket to attend his show?!
had called them out about the venue back then while getting tickets – thankfully had the tickets for tomorrow so didn’t have to deal with this mess but was so looking forward to this https://t.co/rTQ11jfzQI
Exactly a month back I had another Bangalore discussion. At our first Community Walk under Walking Project one of the participants had just moved to Mumbai from Bangalore.
Even as we dove deep into discussions on Mumbai, pedestrian infrastructure and BMC and everything, this young professional shared that he was amused with the fuss, because in Bangalore the situation is so bad that he is very happy being in Mumbai and seeing the priority to pedestrians and other conveniences. None of the road department engineers in Bangalore have pedestrians anywhere on their mind when thinking and working on roads.
How and why will the Bangalore road dept engineers pay heed to pedestrians or traffic for that matter? Do people take such a keen interest in those matters as they do in Trevor Noah? Are they paying anywhere close to those ticket amounts to any of the local groups working for a better governed Bangalore?
These are highly educated, well earning young professionals mostly. They have earning power and purchasing power. What interests them in life and what are they willing to pay for? These are moot questions for me as someone involved with improving quality of life and governance in Indian cities. If people who are well earning and well educated do not take interest in efforts to improve cities then who will?
