All Environment Content
18 published pieces
PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana — Up to 300 Units of Free Solar Electricity for Every Home
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The FRA + TRIFED + CAMPA + VB-G RAM G Convergence — Building Community Forest Economies in Odisha
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CAMPA — The Forest Diversion Fund That Odisha Leads But Rarely Uses Well
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TRIFED and MSP for Minor Forest Produce — Tribal Communities as Market Actors, Not Forest Labourers
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VB–G RAM G Act 2025 — India's Rural Employment Guarantee, Rebuilt from the Ground Up
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Forest Rights Act — The Law That Reversed 150 Years of Forest Injustice
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Sahjeevan — The Pastoral Commons That Government Kept Forgetting
There is a category of land in Gujarat's Banni grasslands that formal development policy has repeatedly failed to see: the commons on which pastoral communities have grazed their cattle for centuries, maintained through customary governance systems that preceded the Indian state....
Foundation for Ecological Security — 17 Million Acres of Commons, Governed by Communities
There is a category of land in India that belongs technically to everyone and practically to no one: the commons. Village grazing lands, community forests, sacred groves, seasonal water bodies — these are not private land and not government-protected forest. They exist in a legal...
Development Alternatives — The World's First Social Enterprise for Sustainable Development
In 1983, Ashok Khosla — physicist, Harvard-trained, former UNEP director — founded Development Alternatives in New Delhi on a premise that was radical at the time and remains under-practiced today: that sustainable development requires not just policies and programmes but technol...
IORA Ecological Solutions — Where Carbon Finance Meets Community Rights
Climate change funding has a distribution problem. The communities that are most dependent on healthy ecosystems — tribal forest communities, mountain farmers, coastal fisherfolk — are typically the least connected to the international carbon and conservation finance systems that...
Chintan — The NGO That Turned Waste Into Wealth and Workers Into Citizens
Delhi generates approximately 10,000 tonnes of municipal solid waste per day. Of this, an estimated 2,000 tonnes — fifteen to twenty percent — is collected and sorted by the informal recycling sector: waste pickers who move through the city's streets, squatter settlements, and mi...
Arghyam — The Philanthropy That Became a Water Policy Institution
Most philanthropic foundations follow a predictable trajectory: they identify a cause, make grants to organisations implementing programmes, measure the outcomes of those programmes, and repeat. The relationship between funder and grantee is clear, and the funder's influence is m...
Gram Vikas — The Toilet That Changed Everything Else
The story of Gram Vikas is, at its surface, a story about toilets. Every household in a village gets a toilet and a bathing room and a piped water connection — before the programme begins, every household must agree to this commitment. The village installs the piped water system....
ATREE — The Research Institution That Lives in the Forest
Most environmental research in India happens in the academy and stays there — published in journals, cited by other journals, read by other researchers. ATREE was explicitly designed to break this cycle. Founded in 1996 by ecologist Kamaljit S. Bawa, it was built on a specific an...
WASSAN — The Network That Taught Dryland India to Share Water
Rayalaseema in southwest Andhra Pradesh averages 270 dry days a year and just 35 days with measurable rainfall. In this landscape, a borewell is not an investment — it is survival. And because it is survival, each farmer drills deeper and pumps faster than his neighbour, creating...
Citizen Science and Biodiversity Monitoring in Tribal Communities
A landmark 2023 study in Communications Earth & Environment, examining Global Biodiversity Information Facility data from 2000–2021, found that participatory monitoring has driven a growing dominance within protected area biodiversity data — and that community-monitored data cove...
Mangrove Restoration — Community-Led Models That Last
Mangroves are among the most productive and most threatened ecosystems on Earth. For Odisha's coastal communities and climate future, they perform several functions simultaneously that no other ecosystem or engineered structure can match at equivalent cost:
Environment & Climate in Odisha: Living on the Front Line
In Kodalpalli village in Nayagarh district, women have patrolled their forest every day for forty years. In Kalahandi's Jamguda, 75 households have been collecting mahua, siali leaves, mushrooms, tubers, and bamboo from the same forest for generations — maintaining it, in the pro...