Society, Culture, Religion and History

Uttarakhand challenges living person status to Ganga and Yamuna rivers, moves SC

It’s July now and the temperature is slowly dipping in Delhi. Only a few migratory birds wintered at the Yamuna biodiversity park remain. Others have left for Central Asia and Siberia. Some species of summer terrestrial migrants are expected to arrive while some others can be seen enjoying the park’s wetlands.

Chennai reels under acute crisis of drinking water

Signs of mustard aphid, a key pest of the mustard crop appeared predictably in November last year in Dinesh’s farm. Drifting across the open green fields, it landed on the tender leaves of the mustard crop. “It sets in November during the flowering and pod bearing stage of the crop and lasts till January.

The serious implications of privatisation of natural resources like water, which is often brought under the overarching umbrella of market reforms, often evade us.

India's groundwater crisis: Gujarat's solar irrigation cooperative embarks on a solution

The year 2009 was an exceptionally dry year for Maharashtra. There was an acute shortage of water. The farmlands went dry. The farmers, unable to pay their debts, were a worried lot. Lakshman Ambilkar of Kinni village in the Yavatmal district of Maharashtra was one such farmer who could not take it anymore. He killed himself, leaving a young, distraught wife to fend for herself.

When torrential downpour submerged thousands of villages and claimed about 300 lives in Jammu & Kashmir in September 2014, loss of wetlands was cited as one of the reasons that aggravated the impact of the natural disaster.

Kokapet, one of the study villages for the project ‘Ensuring Water Security in Metropolitan Hyderabad’, was the first village that we visited for field work. Even though we refer to them as ‘villages’, there was very little that we found village-like here.

Kakkoos, a compelling documentary film on manual scavenging in Tamil Nadu is all about showing the practice as it is without any filter.