One of the crucial guidelines issued by the World Health Organisation, to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), is obligatory hand hygiene - to wash hands with…
As the summer sets in over India every year, there is an announcement that the country waits for – on how the coming monsoon will fare. Much hinges on this…
Around a month ago, an Indian film star shared a video of dolphins near Mumbai shores, on social media. She attributed their appearance to the fresh air following the shutdown…
“I have a lawn in my house and developing a kitchen garden was always on the back burner. But due to one or the other reason I was never able…
A survey by Chandigarh’s administration, of houses illegally built in catchment area of lake Sukhna, is temporarily on hold with the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdown. The survey was being…
In India’s Himachal Pradesh, in the western Himalayas, Anuradha is doubled down into the soils of her farmland in Sudher village, donning a dhattu—the term used in the hills to…
As unconfirmed reports of a novel coronavirus disease-associated nation-wide lockdown swirled in India ahead of the official announcement on March 24, Savita, a domestic help in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital,…
Forced by crop failures due to the delayed monsoon in 2019, Dipu, a farmer from the Sundarbans islands in east India, moved to Tamil Nadu on the south-eastern coast in…
A lesser flameback woodpecker drums a tree trunk while a pair of brown-headed barbets collect berries for their nest, a shikra swoops down on a gecko and then feasts on…
Farida Sheikh remembers her house in the slums in Ahmedabad feeling like a furnace, where summer temperatures have reached up to 50 degrees Celsius. But for the last four years,…
This weekend, Orchha, a town in Madhya Pradesh’s Niwari district will host a government-driven, three-day international tourism festival, Namaste Orchha. The town is known for its 16th-century monuments built by…
“Everyone wants honey. But no one wants the bees near them,” says 34-year-old Pune city resident Amit Godse of Bee Basket, who runs a business extricating beehives from neighborhoods that…
“Today, if you ask a child about house sparrows, he perhaps would know this bird exists, but probably wouldn’t have seen it,” said environmentalist and documentary filmmaker Rakesh Khatri. Growing…
Sitting on his traditional canoe on the Vembanad lake, fisher A. K. Sailan believes that the gods have finally started smiling down on him. While on the eco-sensitive lake, in…
At nights, cities are often hotter than the suburbs or the countryside. They become ‘islands’ of higher temperature within a larger rural landscape, in a phenomenon called the urban heat…
On a warm January afternoon, as the world stepped into a new decade, several hundred students in Kerala took a pledge to protect the environment. “For the sake of the…
In early April 2015, as wind-borne dust particles, remnants from a major dust storm in the Gulf region, made their way towards the Indian peninsula, a group of citizen scientists…
What’s the future of air quality in Kolkata? There’s unlikely to be an improvement if policies maintain status quo. Current policies and measures are not sufficient to substantially cut down…
In the bustling metropolis of Kolkata, in the east Indian state of West Bengal, Rabindra Sarovar, a lake of national importance, is the favourite haunt of over 10,000-morning walkers. Two…
Twenty-seven-year-old Chandra, a house help in Chennai, does not know much about deficient rainfall, rainwater harvesting or the city's degraded water bodies. All she knows is that once in two…
