Giving weightage to the “holistic development” argument, an expert committee of the environment ministry has recommended a near-negligible eco-sensitive zone (ESZ) around Galathea National Park (GNP) in the Great Nicobar…
Persistent, colder climates in the last Ice Age contributed to limiting the distribution of certain commercially and medicinally-important forest species such as cobra saffron (nagkesar) to smaller forest patches that…
It is the silver jubilee year of the Panchayat (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 that was passed by the Indian parliament to empower people living in the fifth…
Land-use changes in the western Himalayan forests, a global biodiversity hotspot with huge numbers of endemic species, have resulted in a massive decline in forest birds in the region, new…
Turn the clock back in time 50,000 years and you would have seen two species of giant prehistoric elephants (Palaeoloxodon namadicus and Stegodon namadicus), a hippopotamus, Hexaprotodon sp., and a…
Concerned with the burning of grasslands and felling of trees, 34-year-old Bhabesh Mahanta is helping build a food forest for birds on a chapori (riverine island) near Guwahati in Assam.…
An analysis of 119 years of rainfall measurements at different rain gauge stations across northeast India, has revealed a decreasing trend in summer rainfall since 1973, including in rainy Meghalaya,…
Amarkantak, the upper catchment area of the Narmada river in central India, has lost a significant percentage of forests and water bodies to agriculture and settlements in the last four…
As the debate around the new farm laws rages on, the Indian government has gone ahead and cleared changes in the country's mining laws, to push mineral extraction and production.…
India’s environment ministry’s expert panels have recommended clearance for the Ujh multipurpose hydroelectric project in Kathua region of Jammu and Kashmir for which 214,502 trees in the ecologically sensitive area…
Forest land amounting to 43 million hectares, more than twice the size of the state of Karnataka, was cleared across the tropics and subtropics between 2004 and 2017, largely for commercial…
Kusum, 14, and Pushpa, 12, (both names changed) ran away from their home in Singrauli, Madhya Pradesh in 2019, as their family didn’t have enough food to survive after losing…
The Rajasthan government has proposed a new draft forest policy which will drive the management and protection of forest in the largest state of India in the next 10 years.…
When Malayalam’s celebrated poet Sugathakumari, a pioneer of environmental activism in Kerala, reached the state’s tribal heartland Attappadi during the early months of 1980, the region looked like a barren…
A mapping exercise for snakes in Uttarakhand, including a component on king cobras, is underway in the Himalayan-foothill state to enable a safer snake-human co-existence. The Uttarakhand forest department is…
Merely 20-kilometres away from Maharashtra’s Nashik city, the Anjaneri plateau has a good forest patch and is home to at least 105 species of forest and grassland birds including those…
What do the trees, water bodies, agricultural fields and forests mean for a city like Delhi? Can we ascribe a monetary value to their contribution? These are some of the…
With the growing impacts of climate change, forest denotification and land use changes, one can ask the question: will our forests survive the next fifty years? But it is also…
"Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, Grow, grow.” These words from the Talmud, a Jewish religious text, welcome the visitors at Dwarson, a…
The cost of relocating tribal people, forest dwellers and pastoral communities for biodiversity conservation in India, is projected to be over a thousand times more than the cost of community-based…