When her mother-in-law started taking her along on forest patrols, Pramila Pradhan, 51, began embracing thengapalli, a form of forest stewardship. In Kodalpalli, Odisha, thenga means stick, and palli means…
Tejal Makwana is packing her bags for the annual sojourn to the salt desert. After the Dussehra festival, she and her husband Danabhai Makwana will rent a tractor, load it…
Women from the Tharu tribal community, living in 46 villages of Dudhwa National Park in Uttar Pradesh, are the forefront of the fight to their community’s right to the forest.…
“Adani company go back,” residents of Jharkhand’s Gondalpura declared in a public hearing organised on July 15, 2022, by the Hazaribagh District Collector’s office to discuss issues surrounding impending land…
At the first-ever global tiger summit, to save tigers from extinction, held at St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2010, 13 tiger range countries, including India took a resolution to double tiger…
A text related to sharing of digital information of genetic resources, fed into the biodiversity negotiations towards the end of the recently-concluded Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) talks, has experts and…
"Pristine wilderness" — a natural zone free of people — as a conservation idea is an erroneous construct, a new study says. It fails to reflect the reality of how…
On the last Monday of the monsoon month in September 2021, 48-year-old Gunawant Ramji Koli left for the Little Rann of Kutch (LRK) to place idols in a mud puddle.…
On a lazy April afternoon, Pallo Devi, 52, sits languidly on a bamboo and jute rope chair outside her home in Haripur Tongia village in Uttarakhand's Haridwar district. Dressed in…
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…
No virus respects national boundaries or sovereign rights of nation states. Yet, citing issues of equity in Virus Sharing Mechanism, Indonesia decided to withhold the virus samples of avian influenza…
“Mining companies come to our villages and our forests to exploit the resources underneath and everyone in the value chain makes money. But it is the tribal community that bears…
Tribal leader V. K. Geetha from Vazhachal forest village has inherited a unique family legacy -- of getting displaced in the name of development. The proposed Athirappilly Hydro Electric Power…
India became a signatory to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 1994. The CBD is a multilateral treaty aimed at conserving biodiversity, its sustainable use and ensuring “fair and…
Odisha’s Similipal Tiger Reserve (STR), which spreads across an area of 2,200 square kilometres, is caught between the animals, which have earned it national fame, and the local tribal people…
To ensure that businesses in India are responsible, sustainable and respect basic human rights, the government of India is in the process of finalising its National Action Plan on Business…
What is a forest? At present, in India, there is no clear nationally-accepted definition of ‘forest’. States are responsible for determining their definition of forests. In its meeting in September…
Before the semi-autonomous status of the north Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir was abolished by the Union Government on August 5, 2019, the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest…
When the 14th Finance Commission incentivised forest cover in states, with the aim of balancing ecology and economic development, the move was welcomed by civil society. The 14th Commission's recommendations,…
In the latest budget session of the Odisha Legislative State Assembly, State forest and environment minister Bikram Keshari Arukha hinted at the extent of mining the northern region of the…
