Right after the monsoon spell, the coastlines of India’s western states, from Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Goa to Karnataka, are lined with dark, sticky balls. These are tarballs, a “seasonal phenomena”…
When COVID-19 started spreading in 2020, humans across the world ran through 4.5 trillion doses of myriad pharmaceuticals. In 2021, India alone sold 3.5 billion pills of just one drug…
While the concentration of sulphur dioxide (SO2), an atmospheric pollutant with health and climate impacts, shows a decreasing trend in India in the recent decade (2010-2020), compared to previous decades,…
Srinivas Behera’s family in Mangalajodi village on the northern banks of the Chilika lake in Odisha along India’s east coast has been engaged in the fishing business for as long…
Buddha Dariya, in Punjab’s Ludhiana city, was once a clear stream of water, flowing into one of the largest rivers of the state, the Sutlej. Today, it is a stream…
In April 2022, several images of dead fish floating in the Banganga tank, located in Mumbai’s Malabar hill area, circulated on news sites and social media platforms. Clean up efforts…
On June 13, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) issued a notice to the Haryana government regarding inaction over hazardous waste contaminating the groundwater near the Bandhwari landfill. The waste…
The landfill, often called Bandhwari, located in the ecologically sensitive Aravallis, is named after the village, whose land it came up on. This growing mountain of trash gets 2,000 tonnes…
The industrial zone in the Kundli area of Haryana’s Sonipat district has provided a livelihood to many over the last 40 years. From a sleepy village, Kundli turned into a…
Water in India has always been perceived from a lens of public good rather than an economic commodity. A sense of ownership is missing among users as they abstract water…
Madhya Pradesh's Manpur town near Pithampur, a Special Economic Zone with almost 50 industrial units, is facing water contamination. The locals assert that the chemical debris from Pithampur is tossed…
The Mula and Mutha rivers originate in the Western Ghats and flow towards each other meeting in Pune at Sangam Bridge, and then flow together towards the Bay of Bengal…
The history of Haryana’s 7,356 villages is as old as its ponds and wells. It is said that people settled wherever they found water storage capacity for human and cattle…
This summer it will be thirty years since the Rio Earth Summit. Unlike the earlier decadal anniversaries, this year the United Nations is not celebrating an event to mark the…
Aquaculture is a rapidly expanding sector globally, with India being the second-largest producer of aquaculture resources and contributing approximately 6.3% to global aquaculture production. The state of West Bengal, with…
The government of India is planning an ambitious programme for the rejuvenation of 13 major Indian rivers through forestry interventions at a cost of nearly Rs. 19,300 crores (Rs. 193…
Tulsa Bai is a 60-year-old woman from the Dumerpani village in the Kanker district of Chhattisgarh. She uses a stick to move from one place to another. It's not just…
New human-made chemicals and synthetic pollutants constantly enter production across the world even as many thousands of these chemicals are already circulating throughout the planet. There's so many, in fact,…
As the COVID-19 pandemic brought sweeping changes to lifestyles, it also altered an important but seldom thought-of aspect of human existence – trash. The pandemic has drastically changed the types and…
Around 20 years ago, Karmo Devi, a resident of Majra village in Himachal Pradesh’s largest industrial area, Nalagarh, dug a well for drinking water. For 20 consecutive years, she and…
