Early on June 6 morning, near a village in Panna Tiger Reserve (PTR) in Madhya Pradesh, a male tiger killed a cow. For the entire day the tiger remained in…
The proposed Bunder diamond block in the Chhatarpur district of Madhya Pradesh has been in the news for the wrong reasons over the years. The diamond mine project, which is…
“I have never seen this kind of a forest fire before. This year, the fire entered our village, and I could see that it was just 100 meters away from…
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…
On a sunny winter afternoon in January, Kusum Bai (name changed), a 40-year-old diamond mine labourer from Kalyanpur village of the Panna district of Madhya Pradesh, had just returned from…
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…
In stories, in art, poetry and more, villages along rivers find a frequent mention. But far from the romanticism associated with life nadiya kinare (along the riverside), is Jagdish’s life…
Ramveer Tanwar, a 26-year-old engineer, gave up a cushy job to work on reviving wetlands in Greater Noida. As urbanisation and modern structures have taken over the region, there’s shrinking…
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 national government has unveiled a ‘single-window clearance system’ to speed up the operationalisation of coal mines and address the coal mining sector’s woes. But despite a plethora of complaints…
From being a humble farmer to a confident leader, Ganga Rajput has come a long way. The 30-year-old is a resident of Chaudhary Khera, a village which lies in Madhya…
Chhattisgarh, which has three tiger reserves, wants to add another one but the wildlife experts and government have locked horns over its location. While the present Chhattisgarh government has decided…
A 60 percent rise in India’s leopard population has been recorded in 2018, compared to 2014, but there is one area in the country, the northeastern landscape, where its population…
Sloth bears are the world's only bears built to eat ants. They love their occasional meat tidbits of course but thrive mostly on ants, insects, fruits and wild berries. Their…
Described as "elegantly comical" by the late ornithologist Ravi Sankaran, the lesser florican, a bird of open grasslands, has been consistently dwindling in numbers in Madhya Pradesh, with farmers switching…
In 1991, the year when India launched its economic reforms, I travelled to the Narmada valley. The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) – the anti-Sardar Sarovar dam movement – had organised…
Since the start of the monsoons, Khelavan Singh, a farmer from Mahaman village, Umaria district of Madhya Pradesh in central India, has been trying to sow paddy in his farm.…
In the past few weeks, four districts of eastern Vidarbha region in Maharasthra flooded. This is a region with four major rivers, dozen-odd dams, almost 50 percent river basin area…
Two years ago, the Odisha government welcomed a tiger and a tigress – Mahavir and Sundari - under India’s first inter-state tiger relocation project. Now, only the tigress survives and…
The proposed conversion of the railways’ Akola-Khandwa metre-gauge line to broad-gauge line through the Melghat tiger reserve (MTR) in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region has drawn concern. Apart from impacting the tiger…