Popular Discourse on Congestion in Varanasi
Description
This dataset comprises a curated corpus of 21 media articles addressing congestion in Varanasi, India, published between 2019 and 2026. It has been developed to support research on how congestion is constructed and debated as a public issue within popular media discourse, with particular relevance to urban studies, mobility research, media analysis, and science and technology studies (STS). The corpus was assembled using a structured Boolean search strategy designed to retrieve publicly circulating texts in which congestion is framed as a matter of collective concern. The search combined place identifiers (Varanasi, Kashi, Banaras), congestion-related terms in both English and Hindi (e.g., traffic, traffic jam, parking problem, road jam, narrow lanes, encroachment, अतिक्रमण, जाम, ट्रैफिक जाम, यातायात), and discursive markers (e.g., public opinion, discourse, narrative, debate, “locals say,” “people say,” social media). This approach enabled the inclusion of bilingual media sources and ensured that the dataset captures the multilingual character of public discourse in the city. The dataset includes articles from a range of sources, including national English-language newspapers, regional Hindi-language outlets, digital news portals, and opinion platforms. It incorporates diverse journalistic forms such as hard news reporting, feature articles, and opinion pieces, reflecting an understanding of popular discourse as a field of circulating narratives rather than a single genre. Articles were included if congestion, traffic, or related mobility pressures formed the primary focus of the text, or were substantively discussed in relation to infrastructure development, governance, or broader processes of urban transformation. Articles that mentioned traffic only incidentally, without framing it as an issue of public concern, were excluded. This dataset enables qualitative analyses of media framing, discourse formation, and the socio-political articulation of urban problems. It is particularly useful for examining how congestion is linked to questions of infrastructure, regulation, encroachment, everyday mobility practices, and visions of urban change in a historically significant and rapidly transforming city. Temporal coverage: 2019–2026 Geographical coverage: Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India Language(s): English and Hindi Number of items: 21 articles Data type: Text corpus (media articles)
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Institutions
- Indian Institute of Technology BHUUttar Pradesh, Varanasi