Are you a resident of Mumbai and/or its nearby surroundings?

Are you curious and enthusiastic about your city, your community and your locality?

Willing to explore this curiosity and/or concerns?

Ready for this exciting discovery along with your friends?

If your answer to all these questions is YES

then PUKAR has an opportunity for you!

PUKAR Youth Fellowship 2012-2013

We too are eager to learn about your ideas and thoughts.

Do come and have a chat with us to transform these ideas into knowledge for all!

Last date for application is MAY 15, 2012

Read more…

A talk by Prof. Arjun Appadurai Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University Tata Chair in Social Sciences, Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

Date: Tuesday, 31 Jan 2012
Time: 3.30 pm
Venue: New Conference Hall, Library Building, Main Campus, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai

Urban Aspirations in Global Cities - A collaborative project of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Max Planck Institute & Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research

Professor Arjun Appadurai is currently Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University in New York City, NY. Arjun Appadurai served as Senior Advisor for Global Initiatives at The New School in New York City, where he also holds a Distinguished Professorship as the John Dewey Professor in the Social Sciences.

Arjun Appadurai was the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School. He was formerly William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of International Studies, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center for Cities and Globalization at Yale University.

Prof. Appadurai is the founder and now the President of Board of Trustees of PUKAR.

“GIRANGAON – AN EXPERIENCE”

To commemorate 30 years of the textile mill workers strike, PUKAR hosted a talk by renowned play writer Jayant Pawar. Mr. Pawar gave a recount of his own experiences growing up in Girangaon and the impact that the mill strike had on his life at the time. He expressed his own aspirations for the future of Girangaon and encouraged youth of the area to work towards retaining its heritage and social fabric.

The winning entries of PUKAR’s essay & limerick contest were announced at the event. Devendra Pawar and Santosh Kadam, local residents of the area, won first prize in the essay and limerick contests respectively.

The Healthy Cities, Wealthy Cities website has been updated to include most of the abstracts and presentations made by PUKAR and Harvard School of Public Health researchers at the International Conference on Urban Health. All of this work is based on research from the Kaula Bandar slum community. Presentations can be found on topics ranging from GIS mapping of the community to childhood immunization rates and adult obesity rates.

This is part of an effort to make our health research open-access and easily available online. Check out our work here.

The sixth International Conference on Urban Health (ICUH) took place in Belo Horizonte, Brazil from November 1-5, 2011.  The conference addressed the issue of urban health action toward equity, focusing on the positive consequences in urban health interventions, as well as the social and public health policies that were required to address these issues.

Six presentations were made by researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), Harvard Medical School (HMS) and PUKAR on research findings from studies conducted in Kaula Bandar, a slum community in Mumbai city. These included a qualitative investigation of women’s delivery location in urban slum-dwelling India, diarrheal episodes and health practices of families in an urban slum in Mumbai, inequality of formal support systems during disasters for the vulnerable residents in an unregistered slum, failures in quality, quantity, and reliability of water provided through an informal distribution system in a slum, simple, affordable methods to map and analyze health data within a densely populated urban slum and the association between obesity and urban exposure in the Mumbai slum of Kaula Bandar.

PUKAR team members Kiran Sawant and Ramnath Subbaraman participated in an orientation tour of an urbanization program in Brazil that transforms slums and agglomerates in neighbourhoods so as to improve the life quality of the dwellers. Spearheaded by Vila Viva the project also addresses social and cultural demands, like the need of coexistence, recreation, education and job generation.

The conference provided PUKAR with a platform to present research findings to a global audience of public health experts. Another significant outcome included the opportunity to network with other development organizations working on urban health related issues in India and share strategies. PUKAR team members were also able to divulge their future plans to funding agencies present at the conference and in the process tap potential donors.