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CITYNEWS Citizens meet
If you ever believed that Mumbaikars were apathetic about the state of their city, then a single glance at the hall of the Hindi Vidya Bhavan School at Marine Drive on June 27 would have dispelled all such notions. The occasion was the fourth anniversary gettogether of Karmayog, an online forum that brings together non-governmental organisations. The point behind this meeting, as coordinator Vinay Somani pointed out, was to bring citizens together for face-to-face discussions on a variety of topics that concerned them. Karmayog representatives said that Mumbai Municipal Commissioner, Dr. Jairaj Phatak, also spontaneously attended as he wanted to meet and interact with NGOs. The list of causes pinned up on the walls ranged from BMC (hawkers, animals, roads, schools, garbage); City Issues (disaster management, open spaces, urban development, slums, public transport); and Citizen Issues (housing, consumer rights, legal help and so on). Other topics of discussion included area clubs, medical, environment, rural issues, disabilities, RTI, and much more. It may have been difficult to be heard over the buzz, but clearly, quite a good deal of networking happened. Participants offered information on solar energy and rainwater harvesting, discussed the pedestrians' protest that was to take place in Chembur the next day, handed out leaflets on their topics of interest and promised to keep in touch to make this city - and this world - a better place. MAM Movies also made free videos of the NGOs present, and 19 such videos were made. According to Vinay Somani, Karmayog believes that there are some primary reasons that are the root cause of problems that citizens face - formal education is not widespread enough; awareness of a citizen’s rights and responsibilities is low; laws are not drafted well enough to ensure they are implementable; the judicial process is slow and underlying economics and reality are not addressed. The Karmayog meeting was one step forward in trying to find solutions to the various problems. Url:
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