Blogs

This blog post originally appeared on WRI.org.

Ten years ago, Sashiram was a job-seeker with a limited education and uncertain employment prospects. Today, he is a solar technician who supervises the installation of solar home systems in multiple locations and is a four-time winner of “Best Employee” at an off-grid energy enterprise in Kundapur, near Manipal, India. People in the villages he serves respect him because he provides a basic need: He electrifies...

This blog post originally appeared in The Hindu.

In 2015, India made a Bonn Challenge commitment to place into restoration 13 million hectares (Mha) of degraded land by 2020 and an additional 8 Mha by 2030. India’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) have also pledged to sequester 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent additionally by 2030 through...

This piece was originally published on scroll.in.

Friday’s stampede at the Elphinstone Road railway station in Mumbai was a tragedy waiting to happen. I speak from my own horrifying experiences of being stuck in dense queues at Lower Parel and Currey Road stations in midtown Mumbai. Around 30,000-40,000 people alight at Elphinstone Road and Lower Parel during peak hours. The numbers are similar for Dadar, Parel and Currey Road. But the...

This blog post originally appeared in WRI Insights.

Arriving in Katmandu days after Hurricane Harvey made landfall, I watched footage of the storm's torrential rains batter southern Texas and saw heartbreaking images of families trapped on rooftops surrounded by toxic stormwater.

Here in Nepal, more than 13,000 kilometers (8,077 miles) away from Houston, the worst monsoon season in years is also inundating villages outside the capital....

Indian cities are going through a massive change. Decision-makers are rethinking urban design to make public infrastructure more useable and accessible. For instance, public bike share systems in Bhopal and Mysore have changed the way people commute; or the redesigning of streets in Bangalore has created a safe pedestrian network. In other cities like Mumbai, Pune, Bhubaneshwar, and Gurgaon, the public right of way is being reimagined taking pedestrians’ safety standards into account. In many of these cities, WRI India is playing an important role in this transformation.

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In March, the World Bank granted India US$8 million to design and pilot a carbon market. The funding announcement followed a meeting in New Delhi where 30 governments comprising the Bank’s carbon market group, the Partnership for Market Readiness, discussed their climate change mitigation actions.

India’s...

The urgency and complexity of the climate change challenge has been globally recognised. As developing countries grapple with the adverse effects of unfavorable climatic stressors, the global community is negotiating to meet the increasing demand for climate finance. This shift in the global conscience has facilitated a conducive environment for mainstreaming climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts, and integrating them firmly into countries’ overall developmental and growth agendas. There is far greater emphasis now on ensuring the climate proofing of development.

To that...

As part of an initiative to test the climate-proofing of development plans in India, WRI and NABARD have been studying the impacts of changing weather patterns in Cuddalore, a coastal district in Tamil Nadu. As a premier development bank in India, NABARD has been instrumental in providing technical and financial support to various development initiatives throughout the country. In Tamil Nadu, the Bank has been particularly contributing to alleviate the state’s dire water needs, through the promotion of participatory water management scheme in collaboration with Government of Tamil Nadu....

The Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) in May 2017 adopted the National Transit Oriented Development policy with the intention of providing a guiding document to states and cities that are adopting Transit Oriented Development (TOD) as an urban growth strategy. While Haryana, Delhi, Ahmedabad and Naya Raipur have TOD policies in place (refer to Table 1), states like Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, and cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Hubli-Dharwad, and Kochi are looking to adopt TOD as the growth strategy and...

From Bangalore to Bengaluru

In 1970, Bangalore had 1.6m people. Within the decade, the emergence and expansion of public sector institutions such as the Indian Space Research Organisation, Bharat Electrical Limited, and Hindustan Machine Tools caused a sudden growth spurt, followed quickly by more growth owing to the textile and information technology industries gaining a foothold in the city. By the 1980s, the population was growing at the rate of 45...