It was a cigarette butt that turned Tariq’s life around. Tariq A. Patloo remembers the moment like it were yesterday. “I was taking a German tourist through one of our…
With the onset of monsoons, excitement sets in, in a community along India’s southeast coast. The Telukunchi village community in Srikakulam district of Andhra Pradesh, with vast swathes of wetlands, prepares…
In Guneri, Kutch, there is a belief that many years ago, when the Indian subcontinent was not as fragmented, a Sufi saint had come to the region and planted two…
According to legend, King Solomon had a brief encounter with a “valley of ants” and his admiration for them led him to value all life forms. The resilience of ants…
A thick, orange-yellow bill with a slightly longer lower mandible (jaw) is one of the most striking features of the Indian skimmer (Rynchops albicollis). This bird with pointed black wings…
A survey by Chandigarh’s administration, of houses illegally built in catchment area of lake Sukhna, is temporarily on hold with the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdown. The survey was being…
Sitting on his traditional canoe on the Vembanad lake, fisher A. K. Sailan believes that the gods have finally started smiling down on him. While on the eco-sensitive lake, in…
On February 4, 2020, images of a rare oriental darter struggling to free its beak from a piece of plastic went viral. The incident was reported from Palwal in Haryana…
With the help of a bamboo pole, Rajesh Raikwad expertly navigates his kishti, a tapered flat-bottomed boat made of iron and painted blue and green, in the Kusum Sagar talaab…
Nearly two and a half years after it had notified the Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules, 2017 for conservation and management of wetlands in the country, the Indian government’s environment…
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…
Venkatesh Kesav and his friends, equipped with gloves, spades, and dustbins, have a weekly ritual of cleaning a 10-acre pond in the Sholinganallur area in Chennai, the capital of Tamil…
Don't lose hope. This is probably not the cliché you want to hear after what the past year has been like. Extreme weather events, wildfires, water crises, rampant deforestation, record…
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…
Mysore city (or Mysuru) in Karnataka sure knows its birds. A lesser-known secret of the city that wears a royal cape is its thriving birding scene. On any given day,…
The months preceding the Lok Sabha election this year was a season of sops. Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled several projects and announced more. But a sit-in protest of 200-odd farmers…
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…
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…
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…
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…