Pinky Alawa and Sapna Rawat cautiously approach a woman drawing water from a hand-pump in the hilly part of central India, in Alirajpur district in Madhya Pradesh. The pump is…
Climate change-induced disasters are a new normal across the world. A magic pill that is prescribed to combat these impacts is complete phasing out of coal and transitioning to renewable…
On January 19, 2020, a four-year-old elephant suspected to have died due to anthrax was found in Sambalpur in Odisha. According to a news report, a post-mortem was conducted on…
The Rajiv Gandhi government had passed its prime when I started practising journalism in 1987. Even though by then the political situation was getting difficult for Gandhi, he had laid…
After sustained pressure from both civil society and courts over the past few years, the Indian government launched the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) in January 2019. Now, one year…
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…
Record extreme events exacted a heavy toll on human, animal lives and property in India as a high-impact mix of seven cyclones, the heaviest monsoon in 25 years, floods that…
Up in the mountains of Nagaland, in Mimi village, bordering Myanmar, village elders recollect that in the late 1970s, there was an outbreak of a “mysterious disease” that claimed more…
“It felt like apocalypse.” The year was 2016 and it was a day after Diwali, one of India’s biggest festivals. Mukuta Das, a young woman who lived in Gurgaon in…
In 2014, India launched the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) – one of the world’s largest drives for sanitation – which aimed to make the country open defecation free by 2019.…
In 2016, the year when a heatwave in India took over a hundred lives, fatalities caused by heat/sun stroke were the second highest cause of “accidental deaths due to forces…
Even as there are concerns around the future of ecologically sensitive Aravalli range running through Haryana’s Gurugram and Faridabad area, a new mountain, the Bandhwari landfill, is rising. Spread across…
Wary of chicken pumped with antibiotics making its way into Manipur’s markets, a section of poultry and dairy farm owners in the Indian state recently appealed to the state government…
Can nutritionally diverse cropping systems make India’s children resilient to future drought-linked stunting? According to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the…
Groundwater quality in India’s desert state Rajasthan is hit by the simultaneous presence of both human-made pollutants and naturally occurring toxic minerals, a study has shown. The spoiled groundwater is…
Legislations by Haryana and Punjab governments to save groundwater seems to have had an unexpected outcome – an increase in winter time air pollution in northern India, suggests a latest…
How much could an Indian consumer end up paying if the coal-fired power plants install the latest technology to control toxic emissions? A recent study has revealed that it would…
Improved sanitation access for children in rural areas may arrest stunting but early-life exposure to high levels of air pollution could play spoilsport in realising these benefits, warn researchers amid…
Researchers have harnessed machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to identify four species of bats in India that could be the additional hosts of the deadly Nipah virus, in…
More than 100 million people around the world today are exposed to dangerously high levels of naturally-occurring groundwater arsenic in sedimentary aquifers. However, the ultimate source of this stubborn bulk-arsenic…
