Driving southward from Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli city, one crosses many towns and villages with all the typical scenes one would expect – busy buses and trains, students in a rush,…
“You should come here during the monsoon to see how big our gauchar (grazing land) was,” reminisces Nanu Rabari, 60, as she breaks pods of Prosopis juliflora, called gando bawal…
More than half the world’s population is projected to live in cities by 2050. This raises the question about the availability of green spaces and resources. The Covid-19 lockdown rekindled…
The high-altitude rangelands of the eastern Himalayas with the backdrop of towering snow-capped mountains might be a dream vacation destination for some. But for many traditional pastoralists who once reared…
Almost four lakh (400,000) people depend on pastoralism as a mainstay of livelihood in Rajasthan. Despite being a much-touted, resilient mechanism for coping with uncertainties and unforeseen circumstances, mobile pastoralists…
In Uttarakhand, there is a strong drive to displace the nomadic pastoral tribe of Van Gujjars in order to protect wildlife. ‘Van’ means forest. It was an identity conceived by…
For the communities practicing nomadic pastoralism, mobility, for centuries, has been an innovative strategy to adapt to variable climatic conditions and respond to fluctuations in resource availability. Their mobility has…
Worldwide efforts to curb climate change include widespread and large-scale afforestation activities. But a recent survey-based study finds that plantations in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh enhance vulnerabilities of…
Blue sheep, locally known as bharal, are wild mountain ungulates which are, in fact, more closely related to goats than sheep. They reside in the Himalayas and are the main…
Esekki leans on his broad staff as he speaks, keeping a watchful eye on his flock of sheep to make sure they didn’t stray too far. “The grasslands used to…
Since the first week of September, Pur, a town in Bhilwara district of Rajasthan has been on an indefinite protest. One of their banners says, “Shut Jindal Company, provide relief…
At the time of India’s upcoming Lok Sabha elections, the agro-pastoral crisis has emerged as a major flashpoint issue. In March and November 2018, tens of thousands of farmers marched…