Articles by Supriya Vohra

When Abhijit Kavalekar was in third grade, he used to walk to school with a group of friends. “My school was about 15 minutes away. We walked in a cloud…

In a scene in Sherni, a recent Hindi film depicting the complicated politics of wildlife conservation in the tiger forests of Madhya Pradesh, when District Forest Officer Vidya Vincent confronts…

Gliding through the water, a diver searches for small fragments of Turbinaria mesenterina or table coral, found in abundance near the islands of Goa in the Arabian Sea. Another diver brings…

The Goa government, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), recently passed the Goa Mineral Development Corporation (GMDC) Bill, 2021 during the legislative assembly’s monsoon session. The bill that enables…

“There were about 25 boats parked in one place. The tide was so high and the wind so powerful that they crashed into one another and broke. And when I…

On April 23, the Central Empowered Committee (CEC), a fact-finding body appointed by the Supreme Court of India to research on matters related to the environment, in response to a…

Sunita Shashi Gawade is a 46-year-old woman living in Dhatwada, a sub-ward of Pissurlem, a mining-affected village in North Goa district. She lives with her husband and two children. Gawade…

On April 28, 2018, Devidas Nayak of Molem, a mining-affected village in south Goa, wrote to the authorities managing the DMF funds, explaining that his agricultural land has lost its…

“This is crazy, Americans rarely eat shark,” exclaims an American video blogger in his April 2019 video while looking at baby sharks in a fish market in Calangute, Goa while…

In less than 100 days, in February 2021, it will be three years since India’s apex court stopped iron ore mining in Goa. The state is yet to find a…

Mayem is a village in Bicholim taluka of the north-eastern hinterland of Goa. It is most famous for its lake, a popular tourist spot called the Mayem lake, which underwent…

Chandrasekhar Shirodkar, 48, returned from Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s. When he came back to Maem, a village in the north-eastern mining belt of India’s western state Goa, he…

Aiming to accelerate the development of the fisheries sector, the Indian government has released the draft National Fisheries Policy 2020 that intends to integrate all components -- marine and inland,…

In early April this year, a video was being circulated amongst animal rights activists in Karnataka. A mahout spoke to the camera, stating that since the lockdown, his 55-year-old captive…

Nilesh Nakhawa was out in the sea in his purse seiner for eight days. On March 23, the 41-year-old fisherman landed at Sassoon Docks, Mumbai, in the western state of…

Yashoda, 52, lives in her mother’s house with her husband and four children, a dog called Babuli, a white cat that meanders around, a hen and her chicks. Her 150-year-old…

Till the 1950s, fishing operations in Karnataka were mostly of traditional, non-mechanised, small scale and subsistence nature. The Indo-Norwegian project in 1966 introduced the mechanisation of fishing crafts with a view of…

January 18th, 2020. It is a hot Saturday afternoon in Sasihithlu, a small fishing village in southern Karnataka. At 12:30 PM, the sun is directly above us, glaring through a…

On July 2 this year, two olive ridley turtles were found entangled in fishing nets at Cavelossim, a village in south Goa. “I was there on duty at the time,”…

On the evening of June 24, 2015, members of the Konkan Cetacean Research Team received an ominous call. A blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), the largest animal in the world, was…