Articles by Anushri Tiwari

At the recently held BBMP – Work Orders, Budgets and Processes Datajam, a group of citizen volunteers analysed the data available in the public domain. Here are their observations and suggestions on BBMP’s pothole work orders. To: Sri. SomashekarBBMP Chief Engineer (Road Infrastructure) Dear Sir, Observations: We analysed BBMP pothole work orders and citizen complaints about potholes on the Fix My Street app. The idea was to see if BBMP was listening to citizen complaints while planning spending on pothole repair. We found that BBMP was spending between Rs 4 crore to Rs 25 crore on pothole management, according to…

In the first of this two-part series, we discussed the quality of the building plans sanction dataset on the BBMP website. The data is potentially crucial in informing, visualising and guiding the built-form in the city. Thus, the imperative to streamline and quality-check the data collation exercise cannot be over emphasised. In the second part, we illustrate the insights from this data. The publicly available data was used to understand the direction and typology of built growth expansion across time at the city, zonal and ward scale. These insights, we argue, are critical inputs for planning and managing the city.…

For urban planners, visualising a city’s growth requires determining the extent and nature of urbanisation that the city has and is experiencing. While satellite imagery is often relied on for comprehending the built growth, this data does not provide insights on what is the ‘nature’ of the built form: i.e. residential, commercial, industrial, among others. Unscrambling the data on building plan sanctions can potentially bridge this gap in understanding. In urban areas, the built growth or construction of buildings is managed and monitored by local bodies through its Town Planning Department, the first of such management being sanctioning a building…