Chennai water crisis once again exposes the city’s climate vulnerability
It is noon and the scorching heat of Chennai’s sun hits across S. Punitha’s face. She has just filled her first pot for the day from a hand pump in…
Restoration of Ansupa Lake brightens wetland conservation hopes
Women in villages surrounding Ansupa, Odisha’s largest natural freshwater lake, are a happier lot since the work on the restoration of the wetland ecosystem began. It’s almost as if their…
When the grass was green: Todas of the Nilgiris long for their lost grasslands
Standing in the middle of a grassy hill, Thorthey Gooden looked around. The grass was short, just an inch long – like a lawn drying out in the summer. In…
Wetlands to wastebins, Mumbai’s diverse habitats house hundreds of bird species
Early on a Sunday morning, before the sun had even risen, hundreds of Mumbaikars stumbled out of their beds. They went crisscrossing through the city and then flocked to certain…
Coonoor citizens join hands to conserve wetlands and waterways
The recent Madras High Court order to evict encroachers from the banks of water bodies in the Nilgiris came as a shot in the arm for the citizens of Coonoor,…
J&K’s draft environment policy gets short shrift from authorities
After dithering over it for years, Jammu & Kashmir’s Department of Forest, Ecology and Environment uploaded the draft of the State Environment Policy (SEP) 2018 on its website in the…
Kerala coast contains ecologically and socio-economically most vulnerable stretches
Home to ‘Venice of the East’, the coastal district of Alappuzha in the south Indian state of Kerala, and forested hills in tourist-magnets Idukki and Wayanad, are “very highly vulnerable”…
Bihar’s wetlands are on a ventilator, but there is still hope from the ground
Seventy-year-old Narayan Sahni reminiscences the days when he used to catch around 8-10 kilograms of fish from the Kanwar Lake in Bihar almost every day. The catch was enough to…
Community protest in the fragile Ladakh Himalayas forces motor rally to change course
A recent stir launched by wildlife enthusiasts and activists in the Ladakh Himalayas over a major motorsport rally intruding upon ecologically sensitive areas of the cold desert, including high-altitude wetlands,…
Kole Birders: Learning habitat conservation from the birds
As the birds returned to their roosts on a warm evening, a motley group of young people gather for a meeting in the Thekinkkad Maidan in Thrissur city of central…
