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Showing posts from June, 2017

Hostile environment: Ahmedabad's Bombay Hotel area unsafe for women

By By Darshini Mahadevia, Renu Desai, Shachi Sanghvi, Suchita Vyas, Aisha Bakde, Mohamad Sharif Pathan, Rafi Malek* There is a growing recognition that large numbers of women in Indian cities experience violence inside and outside their homes and feel insecure about being in public spaces. Patriarchal norms and sexist attitudes towards women are the main underlying reasons for these experiences. However, outside the home, the nature of urban development and governance, such as housing location and type, provision of adequate infrastructure and services, provision of adequate and safe transport, and responsive policing also play an important role in creating safe and unsafe spaces for women in the city, which in turn expands or constrains their access to resources and opportunities. Gender also intersects with class and other social identities such as caste, ethnicity and religion, to shape women’s urban experiences. This study looks at gender insecurity and violence against women in Bo

CRPF unjust to its own personnel, denies 2017 Naxal attack was human rights violation

By Venkatesh Nayak* Readers will recollect the dastardly attack on CRPF personnel that occurred in Chhattisgarh on 24 April, 2017. Left-wing extremist (LWE) groups carried out an attack on a team of 90 CRPF personnel who were on duty, sanitising a stretch of the public road being constructed in the Burkapal-Chintagufa area of Sukma district in Chhattisgarh. At least 25 CRPF personnel are said to have died in the ambush, while scores of others were injured. According to surviving CRPF jawans, an unspecified number of militants are also said to have been killed in the attack. Later, the media reported on the preliminary findings of an internal inquiry conducted by the CRPF to determine what went wrong that cost so many human lives. CRPF denies that the Sukma attack amounts to violation of the human rights of its personnel A couple of weeks after the attack, I sought the following information from the CRPF, under The Right to Information Act, 2005 (RTI Act): “Apropos of the enclosed new

Informal development in Ahmedabad’s Bombay Hotel contribute to violence, crime

By Darshini Mahadevia, Renu Desai, Shachi Sanghvi,Suchita Vyas, Aisha Bakde, Mo Sharif Malek, Rafi Malek* The Bombay Hotel locality in the southern periphery of Ahmedabad has developed mainly since the early/mid 2000s. Small and medium-scale builders acquired agricultural land through a series of informal transactions, developed the land for residential societies without any development permissions and then sold the constructed tenements or plots of land in these societies through informal transactions to Muslims from poor and low-income backgrounds. Crime and violence have been rampant in the locality, leading to creation of unsafe spaces for its residents. There is a proliferation of alcohol, drug and gambling dens and many youth have been drawn towards these illicit activities. Thefts and burglaries are quite common. There are several gangs in and around the locality and conflicts between them erupt every now and then in public spaces. Several factors have come together to create t

Advent of female village leaders: women asserting in meetings up by 25%

By Moin Qazi* “Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women” ― Maya Angelou In her opening address to the United Nations World Conference on Women , Aung San Suu Kyi had said: “There is an outmoded Burmese proverb still recited by men who wish to deny that women too can play a part in bringing necessary change and progress to their society: ‘The dawn rises only when the rooster crows.’ But Burmese people today are well aware of the scientific reasons behind the rising of dawn and the falling of dusk. And the intelligent rooster surely realizes that it is because dawn comes that it crows and not the other way round.” How true it is for rural India. Its women are now heralding the dawn and the roosters are waking up to the new socioeconomic and political revolution that is emerging in the countryside. Women throughout India are ensuring that roads are repaired, electricity is brought to their villages, scho

Conflicts, violence in absence of welfare state in Ahmedabad's Bombay Hotel area

By Darshini Mahadevia, Renu Desai, Shachi Sanghvi, Suchita Vyas, Aisha Bakde, Mo Sharif Pathan, Rafi Malek* Bombay Hotel is a settlement located next to the Pirana garbage dump on Sarkhej-Narol highway. The residential area of the settlement is spread over about 1 sq.km. and comprises of approximately 25,000 Muslim families. It began to emerge from the mid/late 1990s, but has seen rapid development mainly over the past decade. The settlement is an outcome of the processes that have led to the southern urban periphery, from Juhapura to Ramol, turning into a series of Muslim enclaves. The socio-spatial religious divides intensified after the post-Godhra riots of 2002 as the dominant Hindu population kept Muslims out of most residential areas and communal tensions led Muslims to prefer living in the safety of Muslim enclaves. This also led to the ghettoization of the community in some pockets on the southern periphery, with low-income Muslims concentrating in localities like Bombay Hotel

Class, religious inequities: Urban planning of Ahmedabad's Bombay Hotel area

Overlay of Draft TP Schemes on Google Earth Image of Bombay Hotel By Darshini Mahadevia, Renu Desai, Shachi Sanghvi, Suchita Vyas, Mo Sharif Pathan, Rafi Malek* Housing with secure tenure is necessary for poverty alleviation, reducing inequalities and realizing the right to the city. However, the development paradigm in Indian cities plays a central role in creating and perpetuating insecure tenure for a large majority who are unable to access formal housing due to lack of affordability. This insecure tenure exposes them to chronic structural violence. While issues of tenure security in slums that are squatter settlements are widely known, we know less about informal commercial subdivisions that tend to dominate the urban peripheries in many Indian cities. These are residential developments on agricultural lands which have involved builders informally acquiring land from farmers, sub-dividing it into plots and informally constructing societies without taking planning and development pe