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,…
“Still waiting for new beginning”. The words in bold, white, are painted alongside a mural of a lion and lioness, on a sign near the forest guest house in Palpur…
The western state of Gujarat has launched the world’s first trading programme for particulate air pollution. The pilot, launched on World Environment Day in June this year, replicates a market-based…
Once upon a time, in the semi-arid plains of Kutch, grew plants that bore soft white tufts of indigenous, Wagad cotton. The cotton’s softness was in contrast to its hardy…
Nature does not discriminate. In the drought-hit Kutch, all living beings — man, animal, plants — are struggling to cope with its merciless onslaught. A large population of this semi-arid…
For fisherfolk from Gujarat, finding a whale shark tangled in their nets is an unwelcome sight. They can’t legally harvest the protected species, yet the world’s biggest fish can wreak…
“Like fish trapped in a net,” Jam Ismael Ali smiled at the irony of the simile drawn to explain his own situation. One among the few remaining Pagadia fishermen in…
Caught between the two mainstream parties, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress, the farmers of Saurashtra are an angry lot this election season. They are waiting for…
In the second week of February 2019, the presence of a tiger was confirmed in the Mahisagar area of Gujarat but the happiness was short lived as the big cat…
An offshore wind energy project, if found causing environmental damage to marine ecology, could be cancelled, as proposed in the draft offshore wind energy lease rules, 2019 by the Indian…
Land acquisition for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dream project, the bullet train, is far from over, but just ahead of India’s parliamentary elections the project has now received the Coastal Regulation…
Until three years ago, farmers in Dhundi, a village in Gujarat’s Kheda district south-east of the state’s capital city Gandhinagar, knew only one way of mechanical irrigation in their farms…
In the land of contrasts that Kutch is, winter is the lean feeding season for its unique breed of Kharai camels. These camels, unlike the kind most of us are…
How should a country, blessed with mountain ranges like the Aravallis that are over two billion years old, treat them? Spread across four states, the 692-km-long Aravalli range is key…
Acres after acres of land, developed into fruit orchards of different kinds, break the wiry brown monotony of the Kutch landscape in Gujarat. This ‘transformation’ of the semi-arid land has…
After being criticised by the National Green Tribunal (NGT) for failing to finalise the ecologically sensitive area (ESA) in the Western Ghats region, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate…
It is a tale of two large carnivores. While authorities have dragged their feet over finding another home for the lion to ensure its survival in case of unseen dangers,…
The much-publicised “bullet train” is estimated to speed through the Mumbai-Ahmedabad corridor in about two hours. But its development is cutting through decades of work by Mother Nature and its…
The race was between the slow-moving turtles and the industrial projects for India’s fast developing economy – the latter won. The expert panels of the Indian government’s Ministry of Environment,…
“I was not born when my family members were displaced from their ancestral land. Till date we have not got what all was promised to us. Now they want to…