Even as Sikkim introduces climate change disaster studies as part of its school curriculum to aid community preparedness, latest research emphasises the need for the state to be equipped with…
Unsustainable sand mining practices are rampant in India. Despite a set of guidelines in 2016 to curb the practice, illegal and unsustainable sand mining has continued to be common, spurring…
Effluent carrier of the Sivakasi-Virudhunagar-Toothukudi industrial belt in southern Tamil Nadu, Vaippar now looks almost like a river on a deathbed. Numerous chemical factories dot both banks of the east-flowing…
After August 6, 2019, when the Government of India scrapped the semi-autonomous status of the former Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir and divided it into two union territories, recent…
2019 was the year of elections. Starting with the biggest festival of democracy - the elections to the parliament - India witnessed elections every few months at various levels of…
The national elections dominated the happenings of 2019. So did a string of floods, drought and cyclones. In our second year of publication, we at Mongabay-India extensively covered how environmental…
Highlighting the Indian government’s slow progress on water-related works, a parliamentary panel in its latest report has expressed disappointment over the pace of flagship projects like Namami Gange programme and…
Twenty-seven-year-old Chandra, a house help in Chennai, does not know much about deficient rainfall, rainwater harvesting or the city's degraded water bodies. All she knows is that once in two…
In August this year, the Punjab Pollution Control Board (PPCB) filed a criminal case against the mayor, commissioner and four other officials of the Municipal Corporation of Ludhiana, a large…
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.…
Sixty-year-old Ente Basumatary, a resident of Dungar Guri village in the Morigaon district of Assam, in northeast India, expresses both surprise and frustration when asked if he is aware of…
India’s Ganga is a noisy river. There’s the churning of sediment, the hums, grunts and growls of fishes and turtles. There are the cacophonous stretches of cities and industries breathing…
The proposal for 3,097-megawatt Etalin hydropower project in Dibang valley of Arunachal Pradesh in India’s northeast region has been pushed back yet again as questions regarding the project’s impact on…
In the first transboundary river water sharing agreement in decades in South Asia, Bangladesh allowed India to withdraw 1.82 cusecs (cubic feet per second) of water from the Feni river.…
Four years ago, Vasant Kumar’s wholly organic farm in Bommalapura village in Tumakuru district of Karnataka came under the media spotlight as a positive story in an otherwise grim, drought-stricken landscape. His…
Once known for harbouring dacoits, the Chambal badlands in central India, have another, and not so notorious, reason for their fame – the river Chambal and its wildlife. The region…
The rush of water ripped through the valley like an excavator. On August 6, 2019, unusually heavy monsoon rain drenched the mountainside above the Punatsangchhu river in Bhutan, causing an…
“When the rain comes down, it starts looking like a river. Otherwise, it is just like this… a drain full of dirt and filth. If you have to see it…
A pristine valley located hardly 26 km away from the famous hill station Udhagamandalam (Ooty), Avalanche got its name from a massive landslide that took place here more than 150…
On September 17, 2019, when Gujarat’s Sardar Sarovar Dam reservoir was filled to its highest level of 138.68 metres to celebrate Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday at the dam site,…