Our week at Oorvani: Student suicides and measures | Children’s helmets and road safety | Exploring Chennai’s Valmikinagar
Citizen Matters
Civic media with insightful reports, ideas & solutions for better cities | Empowering citizens & enabling change
Whether it is the pressure of entrance exams, final results or employment opportunities or even stress of social media, psychologists say that today’s youngsters need our support more than ever. We look at the reasons and factors contributing to depression, anxiety among students and various measures initiated by the government.?
Citizen Matters: Recommended reads for the week
We have been highlighting the issue of road safety over the past few weeks. One of the less talked about aspects is ensuring children’s safety on roads. Citizen journalist Sowmya Kannan writes about the CAG report on the important issue of non-availability of child helmets.?
Another citizen journalist in Chennai Kanthi Pathak writes about tree walks they conduct to familiarise citizens about the variety of trees in their neighbourhood. Identifying the trees, learning about them and walking through the neighbourhood with like-minded people helps conserve Nature in the long run, she believes.??
While we all like all things nice and clean, we seldom think about the impact of “cleaning agents” such as soaps and liquid soaps on the environment. Citizen journalist Monica Khanna Gulati gives a detailed explainer on how to replace these cleaning agents which have harmful chemicals with eco-friendly and natural products such as soap nuts. It will take some effort and planning, but it will be worth it when you are assured that your clean home is not polluting the environment.??
These and some of our other recent stories below:
OpenCity datajam on urban heat?
Chennai is no stranger to heat but year after year it is getting worse. After conducting a datajam in Bengaluru on the topic of Urban Heat, Opencity is now organising a datajam about the same in Chennai.?
The datajam, Urban Heat in Chennai will be conducted on the 28th September, Saturday, at the DLF IT Park Porur, Chennai between 10:00 am and 5:00 pm. .
While knowledge of data analysis, visualisation, GIS and/or coding would be helpful, anyone with an interest in public problem solving is welcome.?
Participants will use publicly available data to analyse data related to urban heat - temperature, demographics, infrastructure. They can also apply their existing knowledge and understanding of the city to look for challenges, and suggest improvements to mitigate these challenges.
You can register for it using this link: bit.ly/datajam-sep24
We hope you have already subscribed to our Whatsapp broadcast channel; if not, then please join us right away to receive more such stories and regular important civic updates at this link.
You can reach us at [email protected] or any of our social media channels: Instagram | Twitter | Linkedin | Facebook
Till next week, have a great time!