The Altruist

Walk along the roads of Bangalore, take a leisurely stroll if you must, and chances are you will come across a pile of garbage staring at you, with street dogs adding to the nuisance. The cities once famous tag of Garden City is now restricted to the downtown areas and unnervingly near the residences of most politicians and Councillors. While the city municipal corporation does try its best to keep the city litter clean, there is clearly no Singaporean vision that Bangalore has yet to have taken hold off, despite all the efforts in that direction by NGO's, citizens groups and successive state and local governments.  This year , municipal apathy has probably never been more clearly visible, when after the  2015 municipal elections for the BBMP wards, our politicians hooked of to resorts in Kerala and other parts of Karnataka, in order to escape poaching by other parties, while our city dwellers helplessly looked on as the dilapidated state of our public roads was once a...

Everyday, hundreds of thousands of our city dwellers can be seen lining up at the teeming roadside bars of Bangalore, for a drink to drown their sorrows. In many cases, they are blowing up the days income, and that is the best case scenario, for sometimes they borrow money from the household to pay for their drinks. Households of the urban poor are full of tales of how this addiction conundrum is wreaking havoc in their family's life, affecting each member of the family in a drastic way. This is not just an issue affecting poor families alone. Even households that have modest incomes face the problem of their members consuming copious amounts of alcohol, having a large impact on the family environment, and their upbringing and influence on society. States like Kerala have seen the impact of an outright ban on prohibition, causing a bloodthirst amongst many of its people for the strong drink. The situation has already reached pandemic proportions in rural areas in I...

Its a vicious cycle by any standards. Victims of polio like Bharat**, are a result of our society's apathy and sign of the extreme neglect being faced by the semi-urban and rural families across the country. Living in squalid conditions further worsens their health, and the lack of any educational background prevents them from ever leaving these conditions, resulting in them being completely dependent on their already frayed caregivers, who barely are able to make ends meet. In India we have close to 65 million differently-abled citizens, according to the latest figures released in the 2011 Census of the Government of India. Hardly 4% of this number have received a formal education. A vast majority of the differently-abled citizens do not have access to proper healthcare and recuperative treatment in their local environments, often having to travel to cities to get admitted to private hospitals. In short there is a huge void between the needed rehabilitation of the ...

The Government of India, after what seemed to be quite a long wait for the Ex-Servicemen of the various sections of the armed forces, has announced the adoption of the One-Rank One Pension scheme. The announcement of the news through various digital and electronic media has created a flutter amongst the ex-servicemen of the nation, curious to study the impact of the new scheme on their pension disbursements. There is an underlying satisfactory note that can be observed in our veterans, considering that the pension for most , for whom at the time of the their discharge in the early 70s has risen in a linear fashion, via the revisions upto the Sixth Pay Commission of India, from a meager 200 ₹ to approximate 6000 ₹, keeping multiple economic factors into account. The current addition of the arrears to their pension , calculated from June 2014, would materialize in the form of half yearly payouts to their pension accounts, and will result in the pension for each ex-serviceman t...