Earlier this year, on February 15, West Bengal forest department officials apprehended a middle-aged man as he was cycling from Patan beel, a wetland sprawling over more than 100 hectares,…
“Trawling-Project Bhai Bhai, Ek dori-te fansi chai” (Trawling and shrimp culture are brothers and both need to be hanged with the same rope) The Bengali couplet has been a popular…
Compared to a year ago, Sanjit Biswas now worries less about his profits from farming. A small farmer owning a one-acre farm at Hazarinagar village in Hanskhali block of Nadia…
The Dhapa landfill, a major unsegregated solid waste dumping ground in Kolkata, has been growing for over three decades, since 1987. It is set to be cleared by June 2024,…
In a relief to environmentalists and local indigenous population concerned about India’s hydropower ambition in the Dibang river valley region of Arunachal Pradesh, the Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) of the…
Thirty-five-year-old Ramaprasad Maiti, a resident of a Sundarbans island, has moved houses 17 times in his lifetime as erosion tore them down and washed them into the river one by…
A 700 to 800 metres stretch of mangroves to the west of Pakhiraloy ferry ghat on an island in the Indian Sundarbans, part of a plantation project in 2020, was…
Rows of grey cement blocks look like gravestones in an abandoned cemetery. The dilapidated single-storeyed house, adjacent to a field, seems like a setting for a horror film. Less…
“Ngamu, pengba, ngaton or khabak, ngakra …” Tongbram Ahongjao names fish varieties that have gone missing from his environment over the past 40 years. A sexagenarian resident of Thanga, an…
Shubho Ghosh was laying bricks at a construction site, humming to himself. But the very mention of "the coal project" triggered palpable anxiety in the 26-year-old. As he later revealed,…
Over the years, visitors to the Taj Mahal have been complaining of foul smell that’s ruining their experiences at the majestic 17th-century Mughal architecture listed as one of the New…
Rabi Bagdi, a man in his mid-30s who has a family of five to run, moves out of his home at Kabilpur village in West Bengal for work at a…
Sankizahan in Kultali area of the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove ecosystem made of islands, rivers and creeks, used to be a village of fishermen who hunted on traditional and…
Snigdhendu Bhattacharya is a Kolkata-based journalist and author writing on
politics, policies, environmental and socio-economic issues since 2005.
