Communities join hands to keep alive the hoolock gibbon’s song
The call of the western hoolock gibbon, a series of whoops, hoots and tones that rise in a crescendo, is background music in the villages of Meghalaya. Mornings begin with this…
Air pollutants turn into nanodiamonds
Particulates that are under constant flak for contributing to air pollution, now have a chance at reclaiming themselves. Short-lived climate pollutants, carbonaceous aerosols (CAs), such as black carbon, have received…
Traditional knowledge to the rescue in water scarcity-hit Assam
Sometimes, particularly during monsoons, the day starts around 4 a.m., earlier than usual, for Rati Ranjan Mondal in Assam’s Nagrijuli village on the Indo-Bhutan border. Mondal wakes up, after a…
Is the endgame inevitable for the Ganges river dolphin in Barak river of Assam?
The proposed Tipaimukh dam on the Barak river in northeast India - a controversial political issue between India and Bangladesh - could be the last nail in the coffin for…
Tracking carbon source-sink shifts in Kaziranga
Amid the ongoing global discourse on the interplay between carbon dioxide and tropical rainforests, Indian scientists have begun tracking Kaziranga National Park’s behaviour as a carbon sink and source, in…
Usable groundwater depleting in east India despite increasing rainfall, finds study
Researchers warn of impending droughts and famines in flood-prone Assam, linked to the overexploitation of usable groundwater by irrigation-associated pumping. A study that examined the status of the stock of groundwater…
Assam’s rhino habitat overtaken by invasives
On a gloomy afternoon in May 2018, conservation biologist Bibhab Talukdar was visiting Pobitora National Park in Assam. As he rode an elephant into the grasslands at the core of…
It takes a village to save the sparrow
All the 65 households at Borbali Samua, a little village in the Lakhimpur district of Assam, share their homes with a chirpy, industrious, oft-beleaguered creature: the house sparrow. Forty-seven-year-old Jayanta…
Schoolchildren in Assam produce their agenda for the national elections
Children across the world have realised it's now or never. As youth worldwide skip schools today in protest to demand action on climate change, a group of girls in the flood-prone…
Elephants in a reserve forest along India-Bangladesh border struggle for survival
A tiny reserve forest in Assam along a fenced stretch of the India-Bangladesh border is facing a unique predicament. Bereft of a male elephant, the population of six remaining border-cruising…
