VIZAG matters - Sohan Hatangadi's Blog

WRONG MESSAGE FROM GVMC! We are headed on the wrong track. The best beaches in the world are kept natural with minimal landscaping but with basic amenities and top-class maintenance. Mass tourism on our beaches is destroying our valuable natural asset. After every event, we pay for the clean-up. Permanent damage is inflicted upon our sea. It is a simplistic myth that the type of "tourism" we get benefits the city. On the contrary, it diminishes our brand equity, ruins our natural assets and has no great economic gain because we follow the "high footfall, low revenue" model. Meaning that most of the tourists spend pittance in Vizag and trample upon our eco-sensitive assets. We should first deal with the huge geddas that deposit filth on our beaches every day. They will need a massive 200-300 crores budget. After that is fixed think of "beautification" Telling a citizen that he or she comes last on the priority is an insult to us. You build a ci...

STOP DESTROYING OUR BEACH https://youtu.be/RU8I2rIFLh4 CLICK ON THE LINK ABOVE TO FIND OUT HOW VISAKHA UTSAV DAMAGES OUR BEACH AND SEA If we keep quiet we will lose the beauty of our beach and the Temporary leaders and bureaucrats don't give a damn about our real Vizag. Vizagites, please share this message. Let the authorities know that the destruction of our natural assets will not be tolerated anymore. Everything is not empty show business and commerce. Stop the madness now.

Our beach road is already bursting at the seams. A once quiet place to enjoy the beauty of the sea and relax has become a 24X7 Mela. Loudspeakers blaring, protesters protesting, traffic crawling slowly, frequent traffic jams and the relentless press of humanity. We do not seem to understand the importance of quiet common areas. On one hand GVMC with chosen beach road development consultants are  working on plans to decongest our beach road and on the other hand bodies like VUDA and others are planning to take up a completely unnecessary project with our tax money.  There is no parking for the existing aircraft and submarine museum. Now we want to integrate the aircraft museum, the submarine museum and the Victory at Sea memorial at a humongous cost of Rs. 40 crores! Meanwhile really important jobs that have been pending for years are ignored. For example our tourism department cannot find a few lakhs to print tourist guides for the tourist season. The interpr...

 This GVMC initiative must be recognized as path breaking. Tree moving has been known from a long time and we have seen  YouTube videos of machines purpose built for this work. Tree transplantation video But this is probably the first time our civic body has aggressively moved to save a full grown tree. If such an attitude is adopted we can expect to reverse the decline in green cover of our cities.

World tourism day 2016 Times of India dated 25 September 2016 On 27 September, the world will celebrate World Tourism Day. You must wonder if this is just another one of those silly days like friendship day, cell phone day, ice cream day, pet day, beer drinking day, open defecation free day and so on. Does World Tourism Day have any real significance? If it does, what does it mean for us here in Vizag?   What UNWTO does The United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) has 157 countries as members plus several associate members, Affiliate Members representing the private sector, educational institutions, tourism associations and local tourism authorities.  They are responsible for the promotion of responsible, sustainable tourism worldwide. As the leading international organisation in the field of tourism, UNWTO promotes tourism as a driver of economic growth, inclusive development and environmentally sustainable tourism. The organisation generates d...

For God’s sake! TOI 17 July 2016 It’s coming! It’s coming! The festive season is coming! It is the time when a wave of religious fervour sweeps over the population of our fair city. Devotees gather at temples, parks, beaches, community halls, in front of their apartments and at street corners to celebrate festivals such as Guru Powrnima, Mangala Gowri Vratam, Varalakshmi Vratam, Jandyala Powrnami, Sri Krishna Jayanthi, Vinayaka chaturdhi, Durga Puja, Diwali, Kartika masam, Nagula chavithi and so on. These festivals are a time for rejoicing, socialising, shopping (what would the retailer do if there were no festivals?) and communing with God. Over the years these festivals have grown from small family and community activities to huge public spectacles involving lakhs and lakhs of devotees. And due to our constant need to communicate with the divine and solicit His blessings, the numbers joining the festivities is growing exponentially every year. How is this explosion of faith...

My article in the Times of India dated 7 Feb 2016 How the International Fleet Review changed Vizag Our city has recently gone through a transformative change. Several parts of Vizag have gone from ugly to beautiful in a month. Encroachments have been cleared, greenery has been laid, walls have been painted, pavements have been tiled and the city has a clean new look. We must admit that Vizag has never ever looked so bright and shining. The challenge Getting an existing city like Vizag spruced up so quickly is not an easy job. Those of us who have got a house renovated realise that every work looks simple until we start. But then things go wrong. Workers don’t turn up, wrong materials are purchased, things break, unanticipated jobs crop up and the journey to completion is never smooth. Old parts of the city that has grown organically over many decades are never easy to fix. Plans were to be made, money had to come in quickly, contractors with adequate human and monetary reso...

Most of Vizag’s older residents lived in what we called “One Town” because the pin code for that area was simply “1”. While most parts of the old town were densely packed it also had several gracious old buildings like the recruiting office and officer’s accommodation that stood under the shade of massive banyan trees. The trees spread like an aerial city with sturdy roots supporting stout branches for hundreds of feet in all directions. Soldierpeta As the area was home to British soldiers it was also called “Soldierpeta”. In the 1960s and 70s when the port expanded its operations, coal and iron ore dust spread like a cancer over that part of town. Nice big structures were razed to the ground and slum like quarters sprang up everywhere. No one bothered about aesthetics and elegance; someone just pointed at the ground and simply said “build here” and that was it. Consequently from being the pulsating heart of Vizag it went to a scar that no one bothered to heal. The charac...

Vizag’s dirty secret Nallah nostalgia Storm water drains form naturally over time when rain water runs-off the land towards slopes. We also call them “nallahs” or “geddas”. Vizag has hillocks on three sides and a sea on one side. It is natural that all the rain water to gush quite quickly down the slopes and into the sea. Along the way the storm water gathered in some of the low lying areas forming natural reservoirs before making its way to the sea. Vizag always had an excellent natural storm water drainage system. A survey of India map of Vizag in 1929 shows that we had 31 km of storm water drains within the smaller Vizag at that time and 300 acres of water bodies that these storm water drains drained into. Fascinating ecosystem This system of natural storm water drains was an ecological wonderland. Tall grass grew all along the nallahs and played host to myriad creatures. At the bottom of the food chain were the worms, grasshoppers, mantis, tadpoles, frogs, snai...

Vizag's mysterious black hole Read all about it ... click on this link: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/Vizags-mysterious-black-hole/articleshow/46731793.cms?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=toimobile&utm_medium=referral

V izagites have a love affair with plastic and it’s not only on Valentine Day. Look around and see the ubiquitous water bottles, water sachets, milk sachets, plastic bags, tea cups, and Styrofoam plates. Plastics are in mounds everywhere, from Akkayapalem to Andhra University, from Dabagardens to Dwarakanagar, from RK beach to Railway Station, from Gajuwaka to Gopalpatnam. They lie in heaps - at the tiffin, tea and panipoori shops, stuffed into Vizag’s drains and geddas, strewn across our once pristine beaches, at RTC bus stands, alongside our roads and rail tracks, on every empty plot of land and at temples where prasadam and offerings are made accompanied by some sort of plastic. In fact our beaches today still shows the ravages of the recent Shiva Rathri when lakhs bathed themselves in our sacred bay. The trouble with plastics Plastics are a headache to get rid of. They are not soluble in water and they just do not decompose or deteriorate easily. So every time we throw a...

Being practical is being smart Published in The Times of India on 21st December 2014 Every morning our heart leaps with joy when we read about the wondrous developments that are planned for Vizag. Apparently we are going to be a smart city. The mental imagery of this idea is quite enticing. I can visualize eager young executives riding gleaming Metro coaches and the BRTS to work and back. Stylish hospitals delivering babies, who go to smart schools and universities, get qualified, and go on to work in factories and ITES companies. Tourists descending on Vizag and spend bushels of money, they go swimming, wind surfing and sun bathing in swim suits. Our elderly, fortified by excellent health services, sit at the beach (with their binoculars, ensuring that the sun bathers in swim suits are safe). All citizens living in clean green living spaces with parks and houses like in Singapore. Children play in the park and the sound of their laughter permeates the air. What a glorious wonder...