In Vadhavan village, located in the Dahanu taluka of Maharashtra, the inter-tidal zone stretches over five square kilometres, interspersed with rocks and small pools dense with green marine algae or…
A white-throated kingfisher, a horseshoe crab, a whale shark and an Asian elephant are some of the species found entangled in ghost nets in India, mostly along the coasts. An…
Residents of over 15 villages in the West Singhbum district of Jharkhand have been consuming poor quality drinking water from traditional chuas or shallow pits. These pits, about five feet deep,…
Riding three-metre high shore waves, Placid Netto, 72, approached the shore on his eight-foot fibreglass raft, jumped off and clung on to its stern for a moment. He pushed the…
The second part of this two-part series looks at how the expanding salt works are killing small fisheries in Gujarat’s Little Rann of Kutch. The first of the two-part series…
Mesh sizes for the cod end of trawl nets, where captured fish are collected, play a crucial role in preventing overfishing of small-sized fishes. Each state on the western coast…
On May 27, 2020, an oil field owned by Oil India Limited in Baghjan, located near the wetland Maguri Motapung Beel in Assam, experienced a gas leak which led to…
“Imagine this. Your palm is the region of Jaisalmer and the slope that reaches the centre of your palm forms the khadeen,” farmer Chhatar Singh tells Mongabay-India, explaining how the…
On the last day of August 2023, the Indian Meteorological Department announced that it was the driest and hottest August since 1901. The country received 36% less rainfall than normal,…
Last week I was in a group travelling in the Himalayas. Starting from the plains of Punjab, we travelled by road to an altitude of above 11,000 feet, to Chitkul,…
"Rainfed agriculture in India is a risky enterprise, owing to uncertainties in rainfall,” reads a World Bank article published in February 2023. More than half of India's net sown area…
A popular snack in India, makhana, is the seed of a water lily species, Euryale ferox, found in south and east Asia. When harvested, it is actually a tough blackish…
Environmental activists have raised concerns about the government’s Tawi riverfront development project in Jammu and Kashmir stating that it poses a threat to the environment, as the impacts of climate…
On August 3, 2021, a flood washed over several villages in the Bundelkhand region of central India. It is speculated that this flood was caused by the unprecedented rainfall coupled…
Salim Patel is a 43-year old cotton farmer based in Tralsa, a village in Vagra taluka of Gujarat’s Bharuch district. Patel has been farming for over sixteen years. He owns…
Atpadi, a taluka (administrative division) in the Sangli district of southern Maharashtra, covers approximately 60 villages with a population of over 1.5 lakh (150,000). It falls on the upper reaches…
It’s 8 p.m. on a rainy day in mid-October and a family of 10 from Beed has arrived in the Nandhyal village of Kolhapur, a sugarcane growing district in south-western…
While India is making a push for ethanol-blended petrol, by incentivising sugarcane-derived ethanol, concerns remain about the water-guzzling nature of the sugarcane and fair remuneration for farmers. On November 2,…
Exploring the geological history of Earth is fascinating work. That is what paleoclimatologists do. In order to understand climate change or to recognise it, we need to first understand what…
Erwin Fonseca, a 47-year-old farmer lives in Goa’s Assagao, a village near the coast in the northern district of the state. He owns approximately 1,600 square metres of land in…
