Reports

It was a brazen scam that ought to have become a case study in itself; one that many knew of, but no one had quantified, either by design or default. The long and short of it, as Bangalore Mirror has found after examining court documents, was this: 228 trees were felled for a paltry Rs 2.47 lakh when they could have fetched at least 10 times that amount; lakhs of rupees were later siphoned off and shown as expenditure to fell the same (non-existent) trees for road-widening; and all this was done...

The advantage of hindsight is that one can always step back and ascertain the bigger picture. But when one extrapolates disparate developments, one can often land up with a picture that is disturbing. This is what Bangalore Mirror has found by examining court orders (both interim and final) passed in three distinct writ petitions that were filed over time in the Karnataka High Court, tracking the process of amending the Karnataka Preservation of Trees (KPT) Act, and tree-felling by the Bruhat...

As trees keep being marked and numbered for felling to ensure road-widening under the controversial TenderSURE project, a closer look at the entire process digs out one uncomfortable truth. The very law that was enacted and subsequently amended to protect trees in Karnataka and capital Bengaluru is increasingly being either violated or circumvented altogether for the felling of trees. One classic example is the method with which trees are being chopped down in a phased manner—all in small...

A week or so back, citizens woke up to the news that 18 huge trees on Nrupathunga Road had been shortlisted to be felled for execution of the controversial TenderSURE project on the stretch. With intermittent reports of TenderSURE-related tree-felling tricking in since then, the debate over TenderSURE now shifts from the question of lack of transparency in the entire process to one about the ecological damage that the execution of the project has already caused, and will also do in the future. A...

The excitement over Thursday's Jio launch may sooner or later fade away, but the Shah Committee's indictment of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) will ensure that the company remains in a spot. The one-member panel of former Delhi High Court chief justice Ajit Prakash Shah on Wednesday held RIL and its foreign partners BP Plc and Niko Resources guilty of taking out natural gas that belonged to the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) in an offshore block in the Bay of Bengal. Worse for the...

The way manure is thought of may change soon. An Eindhoven designer has developed a technology with which manure can be immediately transformed into bioplastic, biopaper and biotextile. Designer Jalila Essaïdi pursued the project titled Mestic with her BioArt Laboratories as a way of addressing the global manure surplus, which is responsible for excessive amounts of harmful phosphorus and nitrogen in surface and groundwater. Essaïdi, who is known for her work ‘2.6g 329m/s’, also known as...

The TenderSURE project of the Karnataka government has always remained in the news—for right reason or wrong, more so from the time that work on the project got under way. Almost all of those were either claims or allegations. But none of those come across as conclusive either way for the people because both claims and allegations were circumstantial. Everyone's point of view had been rightly raised and heard, but somewhere in between, truth had become a collateral damage. For the people of this...

When Swati Ramanathan, chairperson of tje Jana Urban Space Foundation (Jana USP), complained of not being treated properly by the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) and that she/Jana USP had "volunteered" to do all the construction drawings in the interest of "ensuring quality" of the "unique" project, she had been called out by the chief engineer for road instruction. The engineer had at the meeting of February 28, 2014 argued that the drawings would have been part of the detailed...

One of the reasons why allegations against the TenderSURE initiative of the Karnataka government has not made much headway is that all agencies and government departments have been pointing towards someone else, or simply passing the buck. No one wants to take ownership of the problems. For instance, the Jana Urban Space Foundation (Jana USP, as it calls itself), that has been at the forefront of the project, has always insisted that it is the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) that is...

When controversies erupted over the TenderSURE project of the Karnataka government that sought to re-engineer major roads of Bangalore, most of those were dismissed as conspiracy theories of activists or simply as fertile imagination of habitual detractors of "developmental" projects. A set of documents, procured individually under provisions of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, however indicate that most allegations against the state government—right from the decision to undertake such a...