Subir Ghosh's Blog, page 4
May 12, 2015
It���s not that difficult to be ���carbon neutral���; don���t fall for scams, that���s all
It's more than six months away, but the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP21 or CMP11, which will be held from November 30 to December 11 this year, remains in the news. But, it's all about businesses and governments, and murky deals in the background. It's rather ironic that with climate change itself remaining in the news for one reason or the other, the role / contribution of the individual in the...
May 10, 2015
Indian TV's Nepal earthquake coverage was a disaster in itself
No matter how hard you try not to fume at antics of Indian television reporters, you will invariably fail. They are, bar the sane exceptions that are becoming fewer by the day, decidedly callous, unabashed, unrepentant, and ignorant. They dont learn, they dont do an ethical job of it, and they strut around arrogantly giving you the impression that they are answerable to none. Actually, they are not. Except to their respective managements whose ra...
May 6, 2015
Coming soon: Sweet child labour of mine
In early April came the slightly disconcerting news that the Union government was planning to dilute the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2012. It may soon be illegal to employ children below 14 years of age in any type of commercial or paid work, except in family shops and ventures. It is the exception here which is the dilution in question. And, theres more in the details.
Photog...May 4, 2015
For some nature is priceless, for others it means money
The more it becomes obvious that the state of the environment is a cause for concern, the more one hears of buzzwords in business circles. One of these that has been gaining currency over the last few years is natural capital one that safely assumes that nature is capital.
To say that the concept has been getting wider acceptance of late does not mean that the concept itself is new. The broader concept is that...
May 1, 2015
Bruhat Issue - IV: A split may not help, but devolution of power certainly will
The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) always gets it left, right and centre when it comes to governance. And, if good governance were to be about participatory democracy, the BBMP would be reckoned to be an abject failure. For over 20 years, various ruling dispensations in the state had virtually ignored the Constitution (74th Amendment) Act, 1992, which devolves power to basic units of governance i...
Bruhat Issue - V: The state is gearing up to get its Act together
The issue of splitting up the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) into smaller corporations, under some pretext or the other, has cropped up on a number of occasions in recent times. Only that, this time it's more than an academic exercise a split definitely seems quite on the cards.
What is, however, ironic in the ongoing babble over the pros and cons of a possible trifurcation of the BBMP is that m...
April 29, 2015
Bruhat Issue - III: BBMP needs a watchdog that can bite
If financial health is to be taken as the bottomline, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) has been lying comatose for a while, kept alive only by alternately conniving and obliging state governments irrespective of political ideologies. The BBMP is a financial disaster for many reasons, the prime among them being the tendency to live beyond its means, not mopping up enough revenue for itself, a...
April 27, 2015
Sustainable food is more than just buying ���organic��� stuff
Whenever one hears of 'sustainable food', the mind invariably conjures images of heavily-priced, smartly-packaged organic stuff at swanky departmental stores. Or maybe, ritzy stand-alone stores that sell such items. In many ways this image trivialises matters since sustainable food is more than just that.
Photographs Inside Image: [image error] Caption: Organic strawberries. One cannot have an idea abo...April 26, 2015
Bruhat Issue - II: Bengaluru: A sprawl of a demographic nightmare
The Karnataka Chief Minister has been insistent that the state capital has grown too big in numbers, and, is therefore unmanageable. It is this reason that Siddaramaiah has been propping up as the official explanation to split up the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP).
Bengaluru has definitely grown, and is a big mess in itself. The BBMP is currently the largest municipal corporation in the countr...
April 24, 2015
Bruhat Issue - I: HC decision on BBMP is a reprieve for Siddaramaiah
It's now open season in Bengaluru after the Karnataka High Court ruling that the state government and the State Election Commission (SEC) will get a maximum of six months to hold elections for the reconstitution of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) which was dissolved last week.
A Division Bench of the high court, comprising Chief Justice DH Waghela and Justice Ram Mohan Reddy, on Friday del...
