On Monday, the Indian government referred the Biological Diversity Act Amendment Bill (2021) to a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC). The Bill was developed to amend certain provisions of the Biological…
Political reforms that strengthen the decision-making power of indigenous and forest-dependent communities, over the lands they use, can address challenges with forest carbon finance in India that has a poor…
Conservation of nature, natural resources and wildlife is a mission. To accomplish this mission, good information, data and people’s support are needed. Indian media, both print and digital, is playing…
A senior forest officer in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, was left with no work allocated to him, after he highlighted to the Indian government’s environment ministry that the construction…
India became a signatory to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 1994. The CBD is a multilateral treaty aimed at conserving biodiversity, its sustainable use and ensuring “fair and…
A bright-yellow bird zipped over our heads while we stood at the fringe of a field nestled in a forest. “Aa aamtiki che. (This is an oriole),” said Pratik, pointing…
Every year, Mansi Sharma and her sister Surabhi take at least two trips to Landour (next to Mussoorie) where, for a few days, they just spend their time wandering in…
From covering 640,819 square kilometres (19.49 percent) of India’s total land area in 1987 to covering 712,249 sq. km. (21.67 percent) of the country’s geographical area in 2019, India’s forest…
What is a forest? At present, in India, there is no clear nationally-accepted definition of ‘forest’. States are responsible for determining their definition of forests. In its meeting in September…
Climate and land use change are likely to alter plant species richness in the Eastern Ghats in the future, scientists have said, pressing for urgent conservation attention on the region…
It’s the forest fire season and the officials at the Bandipur Tiger Reserve in Karnataka have stepped up the ante on fire preparedness. With fire watchers assigned to look out…
For half a century, Tulasi Gowda’s life revolved around the saplings that she nurtured with much care and love at the Agasur nursery of the forest department as part of…
Five trillion US dollars. That's how much the overall international trade in medicinal plants and their products alone is expected to amount to by the year 2050. Estimates, as far…
Indian forest officer Rai Singh Jhala skirts the edge of the Monsoon Palace at Sajjangarh, perched high in the Aravalli hills just outside Udaipur city, in the west Indian state…
Every year millions of Indians, who belong to scheduled tribes, collect Rs. two trillion (Rs. 200,000 crore) worth of non-timber forest products (NTFP) from the country's forests. However, in the…
Over the past two decades, scientists have been alarmed by the rapid spread of an infectious disease transmitted by tick bites that afflict forest-dwellers in the verdant, biodiverse tropical forests…
It was his love for nature and wildlife that led Aditya Singh to quit his Indian civil services job, leave his well-appointed house in Delhi and settle in a remote…
Governments are gearing up to determine biodiversity targets for the next decade in 2020, a year dubbed as the make or break year for biodiversity. Meanwhile, disquiet prevails in a…
They may be hundreds of kilometres away from the Indian mainland, but the rich forests and the biodiversity in the strategically important Andaman and the Nicobar Islands (ANI) face pressures…
Besides being called the 'City of Joy', Kolkata, the capital of the east Indian state of West Bengal, has recently been labelled as one of the most polluted cities in…
