Writing about how crime rates in Britain continued to fall despite the economic slump and high youth unemployment, The Economist magazine last month was positive about the fact that rape was bucking the trend. Shivani Singh writes.
Commenting on the lapses in investigating the disappearance of a five-year-old girl in east Delhi who was later found raped, mutilated and locked up in the neighbour’s room, the Delhi high court last week asked the police to keep a close watch on “people coming from nearby states as most of the crimes happening in the Capital are committed by them.”
The unfortunate story of the Yamuna keeps getting worse. Last week, the Delhi Development Authority had put out a public notice in newspapers asking for suggestions and objections to the proposed modification in its zone ‘O’, a highly protected river precinct where no construction whatsoever is allowed.
With the future of their wards in the custody of the private schools, the parents are easily the most vulnerable of consumers, Shivani Singh reports.
Some coincidences carry a sense of foreboding. A day before the collapse of an illegally constructed building killed 74 persons in Maharashtra’s Thane, Delhi cleared a layout plan to regularise an illegal settlement, writes Shivani Singh.
When my colleague’s kid got into this reputed school in the National Capital Region, he couldn’t believe his luck. Now, after four years, he is not sure if he was really lucky. Every year, the school hikes the fee by 25% or more. But he wishes it were worth the money. Shivani Singh writes
Presenting her government’s 15th consecutive budget and her third as finance minister, Shiela Dikshit, who seeks re-election in eight months, offered no sops. Instead, she stepped up spending on health, education and transport. Health, received the biggest boost ever with a 33% hike in allocation. Dikshit promised to open tobacco cessation clinics to help citizens quit smoking, offered Rs. 1 lakh to resident bodies to buy and install treadmills for public use, and declared 2013 as the year of prevention and early detection of diabetes and hypertension, writes Shivani Singh.
There is nothing more mystifying than the great Indian road trick. It is amazing how quickly roads are smoothened in the run-up to an election, and how fast the blacktop vanishes with one downpour or two, hurtling trucks passing over. Shivani Singh reports.
The city's first ever tree survey conducted by local residents in the leafy neighbourhood of south Delhi's Sarvodaya Enclave had an unexpected fallout. Shivani Singh writes.
Delhi is set to rise taller and redraw its skyline. As part of a mid-term review of the Master Plan last fortnight, an advisory committee recommended that buildings that have a provision of stilt parking should be allowed to go up 2.5 metres higher than the existing limit of 15 metres. Shivani Singh writes.
The long-pending proposal to establish a unified body for framing and implementing policies for public transport in the National Capital Region (NCR) was again revived last week, Shivani Singh reports.
For someone in charge of a team that is responsible for filing weather reports among other things that affect the city, I never let the forecast get me down. I do watch out for morning and late evening fog while planning a journey during the winter. But that was all about it till last Friday when I had to cancel a long-planned food tour to the walled city because my friends developed cold feet.
Since December 16, when Delhi was shaken by the horrific gang rape, the city looks a little different. Police, criticised to no end for never being there for the citizens, are now making their presence felt by putting up too many barricades on arterial roads. Shivani Singh writes.
For a city dubbed the “rape capital”, Delhi has reacted rather unusually since a 23-year-old suffered the unimaginable on December 16, Shivani Singh writes.
Let us hope this outpour yields lasting solutions and does not become just another weekend protest, extracting knee-jerk reactions from the authorities, writes Shivani Singh.