Wish you a Happy Ugadi and a great year ahead!
First the good news: we are now on radio! We have started the Bengaluru Matters radio show – broadcast on Radio Active Community Radio 90.4 MHz – this is also available on Soundcloud.
The last few months saw workshops on key topics like air pollution from Co Media Lab, our joint initiative with Radio Active; there are also some exciting collaborative projects with citizen groups from data mapping to creating a neighbourhood planning process template – if you’d like to get involved, do reply to this mail!
In Citizen Matters, we covered some critical topics affecting Bengaluru, as well as cities across India like:
- 5 ways to reduce PM10 air pollution
- Right to Education: Loopholes in RTE implementation, How ‘minority’ tag helped schools skip RTE, Schools explain their side of the story and how parents fight to get free education for their wards.
- Why is justice often delayed in child sexual offence cases? The loophole that compromises child safety in play schools.
- A group of volunteers advocating Sustainable Menstruation shared their stories.
- Learnings from Chennai’s Venkatamangalam composting yard and Manali’s waste management story
With the help of our intern Pierre de Masse, we are deep diving into Bengaluru’s public data on water, waste, power, etc in our Open City data blog. We crossed 110 public datasets on Open City data platform, setup in partnership with Data Meet!
(And I got a chance to meet the President, as an Ashoka fellow!)
The bad news? Servers had issues again and we had to fight some website attacks. Our old Bangalore Citizen Matters server is showing its age, and we are forced to move it to a new system. (Please bear with us through this migration and keep visiting www.citizenmatters.in to track stories from across India’s cities)
All this means we are super-stretched. This is one reason, we have taken a short break from our weekly newsletter (If you want it back, let us know!)
We really need more pair of hands and this means we need to raise more money!
We had seven donors contributing a total of Rs 22,500 last week – Sakuntala Narasimhan, Rajan, Lavanya, Gopal, Ram, Rudreshwar and Sumitra, thank you from the bottom of our heart!
As I mentioned in my last mail — our funding needs are critical; we need 200 citizens contributing Rs 5000 or more each.
If you haven’t donated yet, note that it is the last two days of the financial year. Your contribution means it’s effectively just half the amount out of your pocket. You are saving the rest in taxes*
Only your support can make Citizen Matters – India’s only citizen-focused urban news media, thrive and grow!
Click here to donate
*Any donations made to Oorvani Foundation are exempt u/s 80G