Harsha Devulapalli

Sajjad and Dr. Anant have been working on a report on the state of the minorities in Telangana to be submitted to the Commission of Inquiry for Muslims.

The link above is a paper/presentation that I co-author with them and Indivar - where maps I’ve made feature. 

If you were wondering, why the TRS sweep is such an game changer, refer to the map above. This was the city in 2009. There is no clear winner. There are loads of wards that have Congress (in Blue), TDP (in Yellow). MIM has the bastion intact and it was the kingmaker. 

Hyderabad Urban Lab is currently working on producing our first very working paper as a collective - On Transit. Specifically paratransit. Using our understanding of the industry so far - the idea of the working paper is to recognise the paratransit alternatives as a viable and legit mode of transport. 

As part of the paper - I’ve made a Treemap of the top 20 offences committed by Autorickshaw drivers in Hyderabad District limits. (Data Source : Hyderabad Traffic Police)

Size of the block = Fines Imposed on the Autorickshaw Drivers.

Colour of the block = Recovery Rate = Fines paid up by Autorickshaw Drivers/Fines imposed on the Drivers. 

It is interesting because it tells you - what the police is looking out for while fining autorickshaw drivers. It also tells you what autorickshaw drivers are paying up for - an indicator of what they perceive to be an offence or not. 

Autorickshaw drivers understand extra projection on top of an auto as an offence (Recovery rate is 97 percent.) So if they carry something on top, they are willing to pay up a fine.

However - Piloting with Driver, Signal Jumping and Parking on Service Roads have lower recovery rates. It could mean - autorickshaw drivers do not consider them as much of an offence. They see sharing autorickshaw drivers having often more than 1 person along with the driver. If that is legitimate (even though it is not legal) for sharing autorickshaw drivers, then they do not see why they should pay up (Sharing autos are completely illegal). 

Naani Ki Kahaani, a calendar conceptualized by Bhashwati Sengupta featuring artwork by Neha Vaddadi, is an output of a larger project called A Place for Her.

Rs. 600 for a table top calendar and Rs. 1000 for a wall calendar

To place your order please send us an e-mail at [email protected]. Orders from outside Hyderabad will be charged separately for postage and the charge will depend on the size of the order.

The artworks are fantastic interpretations of personal life-stories shared with us by elderly women as part of our project Meri Kahaani (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miJpVpJ1xKU).

We acquired information on public toilets in Hyderabad from the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation. The response consisted of two physical documents containing a list of 186 toilets along with the Circle and Ward in which they are located, a rough landmark to locate it and the organization which has built and is operating the toilet.

With these documents in hand, we started with a preliminary exercise of digitizing this data and attempting to spatialize it based on the landmarks given in the documents, which by itself revealed the sparseness of public toilets in a city of roughly eight million people. We followed this up with a sample audit in 2014, and a comprehensive audit in 2015 of all the listed toilets.

Researchers of Hyderabad Urban Lab visited each toilet and surveyed the facilities available and their quality. The survey reveals that there are no toilets specifically designed for persons with disabilities, there is a heavy disproportion between facilities for men and women, and the design of toilets would deter most women.

However, our key observation was that even among the few toilets in existence, there were certain locations, a handful of major road junctions, which had a cluster of toilets. Some of these junctions do, in fact, witness heavy pedestrian traffic, but on what basis was it decided that they require three, sometimes four, toilets? Some research revealed to us that nearly 130 new toilets were constructed in the late 2000s as part of something called the ‘Fund Your City Project’ that sought to incentivize public-private partnership in the construction of public amenities. In the case of toilets, private investors had the incentive of using the external wall of the toilet on a major road as advertising space, and in an attempt to cross-subsidize, they would have to build a toilet in an inner road.

1 In India, a legislation passed in 2005 known as the Right to Information Act allows citizens to demand for information from public authorities, if the authority has not already made the information public (which it is required to do as per the same Act). This particular RTI was filed by Syed Shah Ali Hussain and Krishna Yashwant.

The pattern on our map clearly reveals the perverse outcome of the incentive logic applied in the project. Only the toilets on major roads were built, and they were located on the basis of ‘visibility’ for ads, not the needs or demands of the public.

In India, the pedestrian, going from one place to the other, is not the biggest user of these public toilets. The chief users of these toilets are the large number of informal workers who spend most of their day out on the roads: drivers, cart-pushers, hawkers, sanitation workers, etc. They are spread out across the city, across its vast networks of lanes and by-lanes. The fact that toilets exist only on major thoroughfares, so that car-owners can see the ads, and that they just do not materialize on inner roads, where the need is great, and in spite of a grand cross-subsidization scheme, is a matter of grave spatial injustice.

Map Credits: Harsha Devulapalli (Research Associate, Hyderabad Urban Lab)

Text Credits: Indivar Jonnalagadda and Harsha Devulapalli (Research Associates, Hyderabad Urban Lab)

Here’s a map of all the possible transit options in the GHMC limits in the next couple of years along with the map of slums in Hyderabad. The thinner orange and black are the MMTS lines. The thicker blue, green and red lines are the upcoming metro lines. The thinner blue lines are all the bus routes in the city of Hyderabad (the lines are as clear as the datasets; the data still needs a lot more work, sigh)

We found six such markers on different monuments along both banks of the Musi river. The facebook album is of the photographs of the six markers we found. Have you seen others? Let us know!

Under the initiative, the goal was to identify the nodes of flows of waste through formal and informal mechanisms of waste disposal in the city of Hyderabad. I have been interviewing people at these various nodes of the formal waste management such as door to door collectors, sweepers and sanitation truck drivers about their living conditions and prevalent municipal practices as part of understanding the formal waste management sector. Material written on these is now feeding into the course curriculum on “Waste and Hyderabad”. I have also made a map of the formal nodes of waste management - all the dustbins, solid waste transfer stations, sewage treatment plants and dump yards.

Dustbin Location Source : GHMC’s OSRT System.

As part of ongoing research on autorickshaws in Hyderabad, we were asked this “How can one tell whether a meter is tampered? How are meters tampered? What percentage of auto-rickshaws in Hyderabad would have tampered meters?”

We did a blogpost to uncover how your autorickshaw meter might be tampered : http://hydlab.in/blog/portfolio/auto-rickshaws/this-is-how-your-meter-might-be-tampered-but-dont-panic/

PS : This question covers the - how are meters tampered bit. Our report on - why are meters tampered - will be coming out shortly.