- We asked the Mongabay India team to select their top two videos from 2024, each with their reasoning.
- Watch these selections to explore our diverse and compelling environmental films.
- Subscribe to Mongabay India’s YouTube channel for more environmental news documentaries in 2025.
With over a week left in the year and our January videos in production, the end of the year naturally invites reflection. We’ve published an Editor’s Review of 2024, and more roundups will follow this week.
The Mongabay India video team asked colleagues to select their top two videos from 2024, each with their reasoning. We invite you to watch these selections to explore our diverse and compelling work.
Throughout 2024, we strengthened our environmental reporting through multimedia — combining data visualisations, illustrations, podcasts, and films. While Mongabay India primarily produces videos in English and Hindi, we expanded into Marathi through our collaboration with Baimanus, an Aurangabad-based online publication. Our second year of partnership with the All Living Things Environmental Film Festival (ALT EFF) helped create a masterclass for environmental filmmakers and establish a reporting fund, resulting in impactful stories about snakes, soppus, and solutions.
In 2025, we’re excited to welcome a new member to our video team and amplify our reach and storytelling. Let us know in the comments or on social media, the environmental topics you’d like us to cover.
Watch the specially curated videos below, subscribe to our YouTube channel, or follow us on Instagram for original environmental news documentaries and bite-sized videos about India’s environment.
Arathi Menon, Senior Staff Writer
Inside Kashmir’s human-bear conflict
Mongabay India consistently reports increasing human-wildlife conflicts. The primary drivers of these conflicts are expanding human settlements, which provide easy food sources for wildlife, and the degradation of forest patches, where the animals’ natural food has become scarce.
With striking visuals, this video captures the complex dynamics between humans and black bears in Kashmir, presenting a balanced narrative of the ongoing conflict.
It highlights the bears’ plight. Dwindling food sources in degraded forests drives them to human settlements, where food in orchards and open dump yards attracts them. At the same time, the challenges faced by frightened residents and apple farmers, already vulnerable to climate change, add a deeply human perspective to the story.
It is a story of survival — for both humans and bears.
Fading ties with Mumbai’s mudskippers
The film opens with a shot of fishermen gliding effortlessly through the mudflats of Mumbai, picking mudskippers from the wet, grey, muddy earth. This and other striking visuals highlight how this unique amphibious fish once integrated into the daily lives of communities along Mumbai’s coast.
Their numbers have reduced due to factors like habitat loss and increasing pollution. Their declining population is a growing concern for local fisherfolk, whose diet and culture have long featured mudskippers. Mumbai may have sounded the death knell for these slippery, small fish with a unique taste and character.
S. Gopikrishna Warrier, Managing Editor
The overlooked cost of living with tigers
This video is, in a sense, counter-intuitive for an environment publication, and therein lies its beauty.
While there is much praise for the successes achieved by the tiger reserves in the Chandrapur region of Maharashtra in central India, the increase in tiger numbers is not exactly a cause for unadulterated joy for the villagers living around the protected areas. The number of times that they come in conflict with the large cats has increased in recent years, leading to injuries and death. This has intensified their sense of anxiety and helplessness.
The interesting comment in the video is that families from outside villages are unwilling to get their daughters married into villages with tigers in close proximity.
Foraging in the city
Through a simple story of two women (daughter and mother) who have moved to Bengaluru city from their village, a nuanced journalistic story on how the space for non-cultivated greens for the kitchen is disappearing in big cities. While Kalpana (daughter) brought to the city her skills of finding, identifying and harvesting edible greens in Bengaluru’s shrinking open spaces, this foraging skill is likely to disappear within her generation.
The video follows the sights and sounds as Kalpana forages in open spaces and later cooks what she has collected. However, the video highlights that these spaces are not always open to the general public and have governance rules that make foraging impossible.
Priyanka Shankar, Content Coordinator
The forgotten sustainable power of Arunachal’s traditional watermills
Not all indigenous knowledge is available in the public domain for the upcoming generations to learn from. With biodiversity loss, habitat fragmentation, urbanisation, and climate change threatening the traditional knowledge of communities, it becomes important for journalists to report underreported stories and bring diverse voices into their reporting.
In this video, the reporters travelled to West Kameng, Arunachal Pradesh. They spoke to the Shertukpen tribal community––one of the major ethnic groups in the state––to understand how they use traditional watermills to grind maize as a sacred offering for their Khik-saba festival. Apart from learning about how these watermills work and the importance of preserving them for future generations, we also get a glimpse of the wonderful landscape and the vibrant Shertukpen culture.
Covered in mud, buried under myths: Red sand boa illegal trade
How can a species with the same protection as the tiger under the Indian wildlife law, be illegally traded by many people in the country? Superstitions are the driving force. Bizarre myths, stories, and misinformation surrounding the red sand boa have led to many people buying this snake, which has led to a decline in its population.
I like the investigative nature of this video in which the reporters speak with researchers, wildlife rescuers, forest officials, and even the people involved in the illegal trade to understand what factors fuel the crime against the red sand boa. It also spotlights the ripple effects of spreading misinformation, which I found fascinating.
Banner image: A Himalayan black bear in Darjeeling. Image by Oisharya Banerjee/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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