Biodiversity

It may come as a surprise to many that Delhi, a bustling metropolis and home to a population of over 18.6 million, has one of the largest stretches of forests in the country bang in the middle of the city.

From its rather benign origins connoting a type of land classification, the term poromboke has transformed into something grotesque over the years. This term had been in use since the Cholas denoting stretches of land reserved for shared communal use which cannot be bought or sold.

At a time when the government’s attention is steered towards the concerns of the northern rivers like the Ganga and the Yamuna, it is seldom that the polluted rivers of the south India come up for discussion.

Maharashtra approves cost overrun in irrigation projects, set to complete Gosikhurd project

A majority of states fail to stop overexploitation of groundwater

In order to celebrate 20 years of ATREE and to call attention to current challenges in biodiversity conservation, environment and development, ATREE has organized a two day international conference in January, 2017.

Jaman Ram, a resident of Bhikia Sain, a tehsil in Uttarakhand, remembers fishing with his father in the Ramganga. “We could catch 80-100 kilograms of fish a day. That is no longer possible,” he says. Shafiq of Haldwani shares an unsettling memory of the Ramganga. As a young man on a holiday, he was paddling in the river near Marchula when the rock he was standing on shifted.

Lingaraj Jena is a worried man. At 86, he is one of the older fishermen in Berhampura village, an island on the Chilika lake in Odisha. Though he no longer goes for fishing due to old age, he is worried about the opening of new sea mouths; he knows it is not good news for the fishing communities he is a part of that depend on the Chilika for their livelihood.

Most of Hyderabad water bodies reduced to cesspools