On a January evening, standing on the precincts of the ancient Shree Dattatraya Temple, about 200 metres from the Kajli river in Maharashtra, 50-year-old Sidharth Kabnoorkar of Kondgaon-Sakharpa village told…
India's finance minister has announced two major programmes for mangrove plantation and wetlands conservation in the country's latest annual budget, drawing a mixed response among the conservation academics who welcomed…
Wetlands, which connect land and water are among the planet’s most productive and diverse habitats. They play a significant role in shaping our biosphere. Wetlands in the coastal state of…
“Nobody wishes to be a killer. To be held responsible for any being’s death can be traumatising. Let alone an elephant, even the death of a dog, a goat or…
Asian elephants, despite needing 150 kilograms of wild fodder every day, are picky eaters, suggests a recent study in PLOS One by scientists from the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology…
N. S. Jodha’s pioneering work on Commons in 1986 alerted us to the poor’s dependency on these resources. When the commons degrade, the poor suffers the most. However, we knew…
As fragmentation of forests, commercial plantations and uncertain weather conditions threaten the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve on the Western Ghats highlands in southern India, a community of indigenous honey harvesters say…
“Our habitat was once a thick jungle in which trees such as Magnolia sp., Dipterocarpus sp., Pinus sp., Phoebe hainesiana, Quercus sp. and more, as large as three to four metres…
The Konkan region, along India’s west coast, has been a tourist attraction for several years now. Nestled between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, this region has beaches, waterfalls,…
Human-wildlife interactions are on the rise. But not all of them are positive. In India, every year, hundreds of people and animals die due to human-animal conflict. Conflicts with wild…
Namdapha National Park in Arunachal Pradesh is a vast swathe of evergreen forest in the Himalayas, home to elusive clouded leopards, majestic tigers, charismatic hornbills, mystical giant squirrels, enchanting butterflies…
At an altitude of 3,900 metres, in the mountainous Himachal Pradesh, thin Bhoj trees (Himalayan birch or Betula utilus), dominate the landscape, an area known locally as Tapa-phraun (tapa meaning…
A model for an effective melange of mangrove conservation and development has emerged in a new study along the coast of the western state of Gujarat in India, which offers…
Northeast India is home to more than 200 tribes. For the centuries before the government declared forests as ‘protected’, these were the communities that took care of these biodiversity hotspots.…
Three decades ago, in 1992, the Constitution 73rd (on Panchayat Raj) and 74th Amendment Acts (on Nagarpalika or urban local bodies) were enacted. These were the first definitive steps to…
This summer it will be thirty years since the Rio Earth Summit. Unlike the earlier decadal anniversaries, this year the United Nations is not celebrating an event to mark the…
About three years ago, the silence of a quiet evening was broken for Dinesh Das as an adult male wild elephant entered the courtyard of his tin-roofed house in Rani,…
In the mountainous district of Wayanad in Kerala, the Meenangadi grama panchayat has launched a process for turning their area carbon neutral. The measures, planned and implemented by the local…
At a time when India’s standing forests are under threat – with 14 percent of the country’s tree cover being lost in 2019-20 alone, according to Washington-based Global Forest Watch -…
Located in Amarpur block of district Dindori in Madhya Pradesh, Lalpur village is widely divided into two hamlets, Banwasi Tola and Muqaddam Tola. While Banwasi Tola depends on poultry as…
