For 28 years, Noni’s mother has carried her son in her arms. Today, she is growing older and caring for him is becoming harder. ❤️

Noni is 28 and cannot stand or walk. His mother has spent years taking him from doctor to doctor, caring for him while also looking after her husband after he lost his ability to walk. Now, she wants to give Noni the care and freedom he deserves.

A wheelchair, therapist and helper could make everyday life easier for both of them. More importantly, it could help Noni leave the room, watch the tractors and trains he loves, and experience more of the world outside his home.

If you can help Noni and his mother, please check the caption for support details. ❤️

#DisabilityInclusion #DisabilityAwareness #MotherSonLove #MothersLove #InspiringStories #HumanityFirst #SupportNoni #AccessibilityForAll #WheelchairSupport #DisabilityIndia #InspiringIndia #KindnessMatters #thebetterindia

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It is easy to mistake the Pallas’s cat for an unusually fluffy domestic cat that has wandered far beyond the neighbourhood. Its round face, low-set ears, short legs and perpetually unimpressed expression make it look almost cartoonish. 

But the animal known scientifically as Otocolobus manul is very much a wild cat, one built for some of the harshest landscapes in Asia.

In India, finding one is an altogether different story.

The Pallas’s cat is among the country’s least-known small felids, living largely out of sight across the high-altitude Trans-Himalaya. Unlike the snow leopard, which has become an emblem of Himalayan conservation, the Pallas’s cat rarely announces its presence. 

It is small, solitary, remarkably well camouflaged and naturally occurs at low densities, making even camera-trap photographs valuable pieces of evidence.

Where India’s Pallas’s cat has been spotted 

The species was first reported from India in Ladakh, with records from the upper Indus Valley dating back to 1991. 

Since then, scattered observations have gradually established its presence across parts of the Indian Himalaya. Ladakh remains one of the best-known strongholds, with records from landscapes including Changthang and areas around Hanle. Sightings have also emerged from Sikkim and Uttarakhand.

Then came a series of discoveries that began filling in some of the blanks on the map.

In September 2007, a solitary Pallas’s cat was observed on the Tso Lhamo Plateau in North Sikkim at about 5,073 metres above sea level — the first confirmed record of the species in the state.

In Uttarakhand, researchers working in the Nelang Valley of Gangotri National Park recorded the animal at around 4,800 metres. The 2019 report was significant because it provided the first record of Pallas’s cat from the state and showed that the species' southern Himalayan distribution extended farther than previously documented.

More recently, research has continued to reveal how easily this cat can slip beneath the radar.

In Upper Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh, researchers placed 56 camera traps between March and May 2024 as part of snow leopard population estimation. The cameras unexpectedly recorded Pallas’s cats at three independent sites in Hangrang Valley, between 3,900 and 4,100 metres. 

The photographs represented the first photographic evidence of the species in Himachal Pradesh. 

And in Arunachal Pradesh, an extensive survey conducted between July and September 2024 produced another first. 

WWF-India and the Arunachal Pradesh Forest Department deployed 136 camera traps across 83 high-altitude sites covering roughly 2,000 sq km between West Kameng and Tawang. One camera captured a Pallas’s cat at approximately 4,992 metres — the first photographic evidence of the species in Arunachal Pradesh.

The cat is still poorly understood

Its preferred world is not the dense Himalayan forest often associated with wildlife documentaries. Instead, it favours cold, dry and open terrain, alpine grasslands, rocky slopes, shrublands and semi-desert steppe. Rock crevices and abandoned burrows provide shelter, while its thick coat helps it survive extreme temperature fluctuations. 

The species has exceptionally dense fur, with the hair underneath its body particularly long, helping insulate it from the cold ground.

Its appearance is also an evolutionary toolkit. The compact body, short legs, and thick fur reduce heat loss, while its rounded ears sit low against the head. Its coat helps break up its outline among rocks and dry vegetation. 

Meet the master of camouflage, the original grumpy cat of the mountains!

This is the Pallas's cat, a creature so elusive that a fleeting glimpse is a victory for the patient.

Recently, this fluffy, fierce wildcat was spotted and captured on camera once again in the breathtaking… pic.twitter.com/tSMJivB0mF

— The Better India (@thebetterindia) September 24, 2025

Rather than chasing prey over long distances, the Pallas’s cat is an ambush hunter, feeding largely on rodents and other small mammals, along with birds and reptiles.

That diet makes the health of the Himalayan grassland ecosystem particularly important. Research from across its range has identified declining prey, habitat fragmentation, livestock pressure, mining, infrastructure development, herding dogs, and indiscriminate rodent-control practices among potential threats.

There is still much we do not know

Recent work in Ladakh has demonstrated how modern research methods can reveal animals that conventional surveys miss. 

In 2026, researchers documented the first record of Pallas’s cat in the Karakoram Wildlife Sanctuary in northern Ladakh using genetic analysis of a scat sample collected during research on sympatric carnivores. The finding expanded the known distribution of the species within Ladakh and showed why genetic evidence can be particularly useful when dealing with an elusive animal whose physical signs are difficult to distinguish.

For a cat that looks almost too expressive to be real, the Pallas’s cat has mastered the opposite strategy in the wild, remaining unseen.

Sources:

‘First photographic evidence recorded in Arunachal Pradesh of rare Pallas’s cat’: By Scroll, Published on 9 September 2025

‘Grumpy-looking Pallas's cat photographed by camera trap in stunning photo from eastern Himalayas’: By Lydia Smith, Published on 16 September 2025

‘Genetic analysis reveals occurrence of Pallas’s cat Otocolobus manul in the Karakoram Wildlife Sanctuary, Ladakh’: By Cambridge University Press, Published on 23 March 2026

Before a fruit or vegetable reaches our kitchen, it may have already gone through several stages of farming, harvesting and transportation. By the time it lands on our plate, however, there is one thing most of us do almost instinctively: wash it.

But is water enough?

Plain water can remove visible dirt and grime, but it may not remove all pesticide residues. National-level testing has found pesticide residues in one in five fruit samples, highlighting a concern that often remains invisible on the kitchen counter.

It was this everyday problem that caught the attention of Pune-based scientist Dr Asmita Prabhune.

Five years to find a solution

Rather than simply asking people to wash their produce more thoroughly, Dr Prabhune set out to develop a solution that could help tackle pesticide residues more effectively.

For five years, she worked through formulation challenges, trials and testing to develop Sophab, an organic produce-wash solution made using natural salts and herbal oils.

According to the team, Sophab can remove up to 99% of pesticide residues from fresh produce in about two minutes.

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The process is simple. Sophab is diluted in water, fruits or vegetables are soaked in the solution for two to three minutes, gently rubbed and then rinsed with clean water.

And that is it — a small addition to a routine most households already follow.

From the laboratory to the kitchen

Turning an idea into something people can actually use, however, took years of work.

Dr Prabhune’s journey involved repeated trials and testing to arrive at a formulation that could be practical for everyday use. Today, a 100 ml bottle of Sophab costs ₹85.

For her, the motivation was never simply commercial.

“I didn’t want to make a profit. I wanted to help people," she tells.

The concern she is addressing is imperative. One recent study found that people who consumed more spinach, strawberries and bell peppers had higher levels of pesticide biomarkers in their urine.

While washing cannot replace responsible farming practices or food-safety regulations, innovations that help consumers take an additional step at home can make everyday food habits more informed.

An idea that is still evolving

Dr Prabhune and her team are now working on another version of the idea: wipes that could help clean fruits and vegetables when people are eating on the go.

It is a reminder that meaningful innovation does not always have to begin with a complicated machine or futuristic technology. Sometimes, it starts with a question in the kitchen: Can we make something we do every day a little safer?

Dr Prabhune spent five years turning that question into a solution, showing how science, when designed around an everyday need, can find its way from the laboratory to the lives of milli

For a farmer, rain is supposed to be good news.

But when a season's rain arrives in a few intense spells, followed by long periods of wet soil, it can become a threat. Fields can remain submerged, roots struggle for oxygen, nutrients are washed away and crops can lodge or die.

For agriculture, the problem isn't simply too little rain anymore.

It can also be too much rain, arriving too quickly.

As extreme rainfall and flooding put greater pressure on farms, some farmers and researchers are looking at an old resource: India's crop diversity.

Across the country, generations of farmers have conserved rice, millets, pulses, tubers and other local varieties adapted to particular soils, landscapes and climatic conditions. Some have traits that allow them to withstand conditions that can damage more commonly grown crops.

From rice varieties that can survive prolonged flooding to crops traditionally grown in waterlogged landscapes, these indigenous varieties offer an important question for a climate-stressed future:

Could some of the crops that evolved with India's difficult landscapes help farmers adapt to them again?

5 indigenous rice varieties that can take the rain

1. Kajejaya Rice — Karnataka

In coastal Karnataka, farmers have historically cultivated indigenous red rice varieties in landscapes that can remain flooded for days.

ICAR records Kajejaya, an indigenous rice variety cultivated in parts of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi, among varieties that can withstand flooding lasting up to a week, although prolonged flooding can still affect yields.

Its value lies not in being completely unaffected by flooding, but in its ability to survive conditions that can severely damage other crops.

For a farmer facing an unpredictable monsoon, that resilience can matter as much as maximum yield.

2. Rajbhog Rice — Maharashtra

In Maharashtra, tribal farmer Rahibai Soma Popere has spent decades conserving indigenous seeds.

The Better India previously reported that she conserved and multiplied 48 indigenous varieties across 17 crops, including paddy, millets, pulses and oilseeds.

Among them was Rajbhog, a traditional rice variety reported to withstand high rainfall.

For farmers, maintaining such diversity can provide a form of agricultural insurance. When weather, soil or pest conditions change, having several varieties gives them more options than relying on a single crop.

3. Deepwater Rice — Eastern India

In flood-prone parts of eastern India, some traditional rice varieties have adapted to landscapes where water levels can rise substantially during the monsoon.

Unlike conventional rice varieties that may drown when submerged, deepwater rice can respond to rising water by elongating its stem, allowing its leaves to remain above the water surface.

ICAR's National Rice Research Institute notes that different types of flooding require different characteristics. Rapid elongation can help rice cope with deepwater conditions, while other traits are more useful for flash flooding.

4. Hangseswari & Saraswati Rice — Odisha

In Odisha, researchers have taken the idea of flood-resilient rice a step further.

The Indian Institute of Water Management developed a farming system that combines deepwater rice, fish, aquatic crops and post-flood vegetable cultivation.

During flooding, farmers grow waterlogging-tolerant deepwater rice varieties such as Hangseswari and Saraswati. Fish are reared in water-harvesting structures, while vegetables and other crops are cultivated after the water recedes.

ICAR reports that the system was adopted by around 150 farmers in Puri district, generating reported earnings of Rs 80,000–Rs 90,000 per hectare in an ecosystem previously considered unproductive.

Here, the crop isn't simply surviving the flood.

The entire farm is being designed around it.

5. Kuttanad's Traditional Rice Farming — Kerala

Few places illustrate the relationship between crops and water better than Kuttanad in Kerala.

Much of the region's agriculture takes place below sea level. Its low-lying paddy fields face waterlogging, flooding, soil acidity and climatic variations.

The region has developed specialised agricultural practices suited to this unusual landscape and has been recognised as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System.

Kuttanad shows that resilience doesn't always mean keeping water away from farms.

Sometimes, it means learning how to farm with water.

Why can some crops survive what others can't?

So what makes one crop better suited to a difficult environment than another?

For crops exposed to flooding or waterlogging, researchers look at several characteristics.

Submergence tolerance

Some rice varieties can survive complete submergence for periods that would severely damage other varieties.

Deepwater adaptation

Certain rice varieties respond to rising water by rapidly elongating their stems, allowing leaves to remain above the water surface.

Plant architecture

Plant height, stem strength and leaf characteristics can influence how a crop responds to waterlogging and lodging.

Local adaptation

A variety cultivated for generations in a particular landscape may carry traits suited to that area's soil, rainfall and growing conditions.

But resilience isn't always about a single genetic trait.

Sometimes, diversity itself is the advantage.

What farmers have known for generations

Long before climate resilience became a scientific term, farmers were selecting seeds based on what worked on their land.

They observed which crops:

• survived a difficult monsoon

• tolerated poor soils

• resisted pests

• recovered after flooding

• produced despite changing conditions

That knowledge remains particularly important as rainfall becomes less predictable.

Sources: 

‘Kuttanad Below Sea Level Farming System, India’

‘Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems: A Legacy for the Future’

‘Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS)’

‘ICAR-NRRI Showcases Rice Technologies at Global Conference on Climate Resilience’

You've been with your partner for over a decade. You've built a home together, split the rent, argued over whose turn it is to do the dishes — all the ordinary texture of a life shared. You're not married. Maybe you're planning to be, someday.

Then, one day, your own family decides they've had enough. And the disapproval turns into something uglier: threats.

Where do you even go with that?

A couple in Delhi, together since 2014, found out this August. The woman's father and brother had made their disapproval clear, and it had tipped into threats of violence.

So they did the obvious thing — walked into their local police station on 6 August and filed a complaint.

And then, nothing happened. No follow-up. No action. Just silence.

So they did something most people in their situation don't even realise they're allowed to do. They went to the Delhi High Court.

On 13 August, Justice Saurabh Banerjee gave them an answer, and it wasn't a cautious one. Consenting adults, he said, have an unfettered right to choose a partner and live with them. Full stop. Not her father, not her brother, nobody else gets a say.

He ordered the police at Vijay Vihar station to protect the couple whenever they needed it — and to keep doing so wherever they moved next.

"If you're in this situation yourself, or worried you might end up in one, that ruling matters to you directly. It's applicable to most people who find themselves in a similar situation," says Lalitha Sudakaran, a Chennai-based family law practitioner.

So let's actually walk through this together: what you're protected against, where that protection can wobble, and — this is the part that matters most — what to do if you ever need to use it.

You don't owe anyone an explanation for your relationship

Start here, because it's the thing families get wrong most often: your parents, relatives, or friends have no legal say in who you choose to live with. That's not just a nice sentiment. It's written into the Constitution.

"Article 19 and Article 21 guarantee you, as a consenting adult, freedom of choice and the right to life and liberty, and neither clause carves out an exception for unmarried couples," Lalitha explains.

Two Supreme Court cases back this up, if you ever need to point to something concrete. In Nandakumar v State of Kerala, the Court said adults can live together whether they ever marry or not.

Then in 2018, in the Hadiya case — Shafin Jahan v Asokan K M — it went a step further, saying that policing someone's personal choices in the name of "social morality" doesn't just overreach. It strips them of their own identity.

And yes, you can ask for police protection even without a marriage certificate in hand. As Chennai-based Senior Advocate Karthikeyan Subaraj puts it: "Living together is part of your right to life itself, under Article 21, and courts have leaned on that reasoning again and again while deciding protection and maintenance cases for people in your position."

What if the danger isn't coming from your family but from the relationship?

“You're covered here too, more than you might expect. The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 never asks whether you're married. It covers any "relationship in the nature of marriage," which means you can seek a protection order, the right to stay in your shared home, and compensation for abuse — physical, emotional, or financial — on the same footing as a wife would have,” Karthikeyan explains.

There's a bar you need to clear for this to apply, though. The Supreme Court has said you both need to be adults who are free to marry, that you need to have lived together for a genuine stretch of time, not on a whim, and that you need to have presented yourselves to the world as a couple.

Courts have also said shared finances and running a household together count in your favour — but a casual or brief relationship won't qualify, and neither will one where you didn't know your partner was already married elsewhere.

Breakups happen, of course. If yours does, and the relationship was long-term and functioned like a marriage, you can claim maintenance. The law that used to be Section 125 of the CrPC — now folded into the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita — has been read by courts to cover exactly this. 

And a 2019 ruling went further still, saying you could claim broader remedies under the Domestic Violence Act than maintenance law alone offers. As Delhi-based lawyer Manoj Kataria puts it: "The law doesn't reward a ceremony. It recognises a relationship that functioned like one."

If you have kids together, here's some good news — they're not left in limbo, which surprises a lot of people. 

“Courts have repeatedly said children born into live-in relationships are legitimate, with the same right to inherit their parents' self-acquired property as any other child. The one exception is ancestral property. This same principle also guides how custody and guardianship get decided,” Lalitha says.

And just to put this to rest — no, none of this is illegal, no matter what anyone around you implies. Back in 2010, the Supreme Court shut down the idea that living together outside marriage is a crime or a moral failing. And in 2022, Kerala's High Court took it further, ruling that consenting adults can choose to live together regardless of gender — extending the same protection to same-sex couples.

Here's where it gets shakier

None of what you just read lives in one single law. It's been pieced together, ruling by ruling, over 15 years. Which means, in practice, how well you're protected can depend a lot on which judge you happen to draw.

In 2021, for instance, a Punjab and Haryana High Court bench refused a threatened live-in couple protection, saying it would "disturb the social fabric." Put that next to the Delhi order from this August, and you've got two courts, five years apart, landing on almost opposite conclusions from the same basic question.

Kataria doesn't sugarcoat why: "Outcomes in these cases often track a judge's personal sense of morality more closely than they track what the Supreme Court has actually laid down." The same facts, he says, can get you protected in one courtroom and turned away in another. Subaraj agrees — courts have leaned on the right reasoning again and again, but "again and again doesn't mean consistently."

Advocate Shantanu Tewari points to a bigger gap behind all this: there's still no dedicated government mechanism you can walk into if you're threatened. That's a big part of why so many people end up filing writ petitions in constitutional courts — for something that really should just be a routine police response.

A few states have started closing that gap themselves. If you're in Uttarakhand, its Uniform Civil Code, in force since January 2026, now asks live-in couples to register their relationship with the state. That buys you clearer rights — in exchange for more state scrutiny than courts had otherwise left alone.

If you're facing threats right now, here's what to actually do

“Go file a written complaint at your local police station first. Don't leave without something to show for it — a stamped copy, or at least the complaint or FIR number. That's your paper trail, and you'll need it,” Lalitha recommends.

Start documenting everything as it happens. Save the threatening messages, the call logs, voice notes, and note down anyone who witnessed it. If there's a specific incident, a medical record or a photo from that day makes your case much stronger.

If the station drags its feet, escalate. Send a written representation to the Deputy Commissioner of Police, or whoever the equivalent senior officer is in your city, and mention your original complaint number.

If that stalls too, a writ petition before the High Court is your strongest move — it's literally what got the Delhi couple their protection order.

And once you do have a protection order, keep a copy on you, and hand one to your local police station too. You want it on record for next time, if there is one.

According to legal experts, if what you're dealing with is violence from inside the relationship rather than from your family, your path in looks different. You can go straight to a Protection Officer or a registered NGO service provider in your district, or to a magistrate's court — you don't need a police complaint first. 

They're required to help you file a Domestic Incident Report, and that's what the court acts on. Along the way, hold onto anything that shows you shared a life — joint bills, a shared address on your ID, photos, people who knew the two of you as a couple. That's exactly what a court will look for.

Thinking about maintenance someday? The same kind of proof matters: how long you lived together, how you split finances, how the world saw you as a couple. Honestly, it's worth starting to keep that evidence now, while things are good, rather than scrambling for it later.

And if you have children, get the birth registered with both of you named as parents, as early as you can. That record tends to be the first thing courts and institutions reach for if inheritance or custody ever comes up.

Where you can actually go for help

Your District or State Legal Services Authority (DLSA/SLSA) offers free legal aid — including help filing a writ petition — if cost is what's stopping you.

The NALSA helpline, 15100, can point you to your nearest legal aid centre.

A Protection Officer or a registered NGO service provider is your way in for a domestic violence complaint, and you can go to them directly, no police complaint required first.

And a practising lawyer is who you'll want for a writ petition to the High Court — right now, that's your most reliable route if local police just aren't acting.

The short version

Get a written, acknowledged complaint filed at your local police station. Keep the number.

Save every threat, message, and witness detail as it happens.

If police don't act, escalate in writing to a senior officer, citing your original complaint.

Still stuck? File a writ petition in the High Court — DLSA/SLSA or the NALSA helpline (15100) can get you free legal aid.

If the danger is inside the relationship, go straight to a Protection Officer or a registered NGO.

Once you have any protection order, keep it close, and file a copy with your local station.

None of that legislative back-and-forth was on the Delhi couple's mind on 13 August, though. What mattered to them was smaller, and much more concrete: an order they could fold up and carry to a police station. Twelve years after they chose each other, the law finally put it in writing.

The choice was, and always had been, theirs. It's yours too.

This is a general guide, not a substitute for legal advice. The right path can vary by your state and your situation, so where you can, talk to a lawyer or your nearest legal aid centre before acting on any of this.

They said I looked like a skeleton. You can never become a model.

Tall, skinny and dusky, she faced constant comments about her appearance. But her father believed in her before she believed in herself. At 18, she entered an audition, won a competition among nearly 10,000 people and earned the chance to represent India in Milan.

The journey came with countless rejections, but she kept showing up. From Pune to Paris, Milan and London, she eventually walked for global brands including H&M and Armani.

Her journey is a reminder that you don’t need everyone to believe in your dream. Sometimes, you just need to believe in it first.

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Mumbai is cracking down on wrong-side driving. 🚦

IPS officer Satyanarayan Choudhary has launched a major traffic drive against this dangerous violation. Nearly 800 offenders are being caught every day, with 5,000+ motorists caught in just one month and around 350 vehicles seized.

But stopping wrong-side driving is only part of the solution. Mumbai traffic police have also identified 95 accident-prone spots and are working to improve roads, signals and lighting. Because saving a few minutes on the road should never put a life at risk.

Would stricter action make Mumbai’s roads safer? Tell us in the comments.

#MumbaiTraffic #RoadSafety #MumbaiPolice #TrafficPolice #WrongSideDriving #TrafficRules #SafeDriving #RoadSafetyIndia #MumbaiRoads #TrafficViolations #IPSOfficer #SaferRoads #Mumbai #thebetterindia

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At the edges of forests, along village boundaries, and in old backyard orchards across Karnataka, wild mango trees cling to a shrinking place in the landscape. Unlike the polished, uniform fruits that fill city stalls, these mangoes are smaller, sharper, more aromatic — fruits that carry the weight of local memory.

On a 5.4-acre plot in Kukkila, nestled within Vitlapadnur village of Bantwal taluk in Dakshina Kannada, rows of young mango trees rise like verses in a living manuscript.

Each sapling bears a name — often remembered only by the older generation of farmers — and carries with it the story of a coastal landscape once rich with hundreds of naada mavu, local mango varieties now fading into obscurity.

At the heart of this green archive stands Dr P Manohara Upadhya — a veterinary surgeon by profession, and a gentle conservationist by passion.

Welcome to the world of wild mangoes of Karnataka.

The Mangoes that almost disappeared

In Karnataka’s lush Malnad and coastal regions, mango trees are more than just fruit-bearing trees. Many varieties are closely tied to the villages and families where they originated, carrying with them stories, traditions and the unique flavours of their home regions.

But that sense of familiarity is under strain.

Old trees are being felled, farms are shifting, and traditional food habits are fading. In many places, native mangoes vanish simply because they are deemed inconvenient or less profitable than standardised commercial crops.

Farmers are generally reluctant to cultivate wild varieties, since the market favours fruits that sell by standardised names rather than for their uniqueness.

Climate stress compounds the decline — irregular rains, sudden heat, and disease weaken flowering and fruit set, leaving harvests uncertain year after year.

The loss is more than agricultural; it is cultural. Each fallen tree erases a local name, a flavour, a seasonal memory. For families who have relied on the same tree for generations, this is not just decline — it is a quiet erosion of identity.

Yet across Karnataka, farmers, conservationists, nurseries and researchers are working to ensure these mangoes do not disappear.

A living archive in Kukkila

On Upadhya’s 5.4-acre plot in Kukkila, that effort has taken root in the form of Maavu Mantapa — a mango gene bank raised using his life’s savings.

Its name in Kannada evokes both “mango” (maavu) and a sheltering pavilion (mantapa). The idea is simple but powerful: collect and grow varieties before they are lost, give each one a place, and preserve the living tree rather than merely its memory.

By May 2026, Maavu Mantapa had already grown into a living archive with 600 trees, of which 430 were indigenous and 170 were Indian hybrid and exotic mango varieties.

Each sapling bears a name and, often, a story of where it came from.

As Dr Upadhya explains, the work is far from finished. Once the trees begin yielding, each will be carefully documented in an ongoing study. That process has already begun, with five plants bearing fruit this year and another hundred expected next seasons.

Supporting him is NaaMaaMi — Naada Maavu Mitraru, or “friends of local mangoes” — a dedicated team that helps identify and track species across the region.

What stands in Kukkila is therefore more than an orchard. It is an attempt to keep Karnataka’s disappearing mango vocabulary alive — one tree, one name and one variety at a time.

Each mango carries a story

Across Karnataka, the names of these mangoes are rooted in the places where they grew.

There is Otte Maavu from Kukkalli and Kuri Tale from Anavatti, both grown in Hosanagar. Belur in Sagara taluk is known for Apple Raja, a mango prized for its crisp bite.

Ripponpet has its own favourites, including Kubera and Swastik, while Hosanagara is home to Apoorva.

Further towards the coast, Puttur is known for Puttur Master, also called Bolwar Kasi. Near Kundapur, the Narayana Kini mango from Kota adds another distinctive flavour to Karnataka’s rich collection of traditional varieties.

Uttara Kannada has its own collection of distinctive mango varieties. Maani Bhatta comes from Kumta, while Gidugana Mane and Varate Guduga are found around Sirsi. Karwar’s Kodibag is known for Kari Ishaad, while Sullia has its own local variety called Nekkare.

Some mangoes are valued for their ability to bear fruit throughout the year. Sagara’s Kattinakere and Mangaluru’s Derebail are both all-season varieties that can keep households supplied with mangoes year-round. Yadehalli and Gilalagundi, grown near Anandapuram, are also known for their all-season harvests.

Beyond their names and flavours, these mango varieties embody practical traits prized by growers.

Kadugaayi is pickled raw when the fruit weighs around 1.5 kg, helping preserve it for longer. Kuchgaayi is preserved whole in brine, extending its shelf life beyond mango season.

Bolwar Kasi is known for its disease resistance and fast growth, while Baaymane Kasi produces exceptionally large ripe mangoes, weighing between 700 grams and 1 kg. Sundar is remembered for its heavy yield and importance to local households.

Veteran journalist Shree Padre, who is the editor of Adike Patrike, a Kannada monthly farm magazine dedicated to farmers and rural communities, shares:

“These wild mangoes weave together Karnataka’s cultural tapestry — where land, lineage, and tradition meet in orchards that embody identity as much as they yield fruit. They are more than mangoes; they are living legacies, each bite carrying the flavour of its soil and the memory of its people.”

The orchard is only the beginning

The preservation of these varieties is not confined to Kukkila.

Across Sirsi, Karwar, Shivamogga, Dakshina Kannada, Belur, Gadag and other parts of Karnataka, custodian farmers continue to grow and care for lesser-known mango varieties.

In his fifties, Rajendra Hindumane is a celebrated farmer from Hosahalli village near Jog Falls in Shivamogga district, Karnataka.

Renowned for his integrated farming system and for cultivating more than 1,200 varieties of exotic fruits, spices, and medicinal plants, he also proudly nurtures 40 Appemidi mango trees on his two-acre farm.

These trees, rooted in the heritage of Malnad, are tended with care by Rajendra alongside his teenage daughters, making the orchard both a family endeavour and a living legacy.

Kannangi Seshadri (74), a farmer from Kannangi village in Shivamogga, cultivates 20 Appemidi mango trees on his 68-acre farm, alongside arecanut, jackfruit, black pepper, and nutmeg.

He explains: “Naada mavu thrive in the Malnad region, unlike Raspuri or Alphonso. They bear fruit at the onset of the monsoon in June, just as the rains arrive.”

Farmer Mapalathota Subraya Bhat of Markanja village, near Sullia in Dakshina Kannada district, has preserved 80 wild varieties on his land.

Eight years ago, Sameer Patil planted 500 Appemidi plants in Lakkalakatti village in Ron taluka of Gadag district, which receives scanty rainfall, unlike the coastal areas.

“Its ability to flourish in arid and semi-arid regions prompted me to plant this new crop, and I am getting good harvests,” he said.

Together, these farmers are doing something crucial: keeping varieties in cultivation rather than allowing them to survive only as memories of older orchards.

Saving a tree is not enough; Its important to grow more

For a rare mango variety to survive, protecting an old tree is only the beginning. It also needs to be propagated and planted elsewhere.

Ananthmurthy Javali was among the first to collect scion cuttings from forests and develop them into mother plants in his nursery.

Today, he maintains over 400 mother plants of Appemidi mango at Ripponpet village, making him a key figure in safeguarding this heritage fruit.

His work ensures that rare mango genotypes are not lost to deforestation or neglect, keeping Karnataka’s mango heritage alive.

“I have lost count of wild mango saplings I have sold over the years. It may be over 50,000,” he says.

The scale of that propagation offers these varieties a chance to move beyond the trees where they were first found.

“We grow these varieties more for their emotional value than for demand. There are very few takers, and growers rarely ask for them. But when dedicated mango enthusiasts visit our nursery, we suggest unique types like Apple Raja, Varate Guduga, or Kadugaayi, highlighting what makes each special,” says Amogh Javali, who co-runs the three-decade-old Ankur Farm and Nursery with his father, Ananthmurthy.

In 2025, Ananthmurthy was honoured with the Plant Genome Saviour Farmer Recognition Award by the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Authority (PPV&FRA).

The award recognised his conservation of Appemidi mango, jackfruit, and other rare fruit species — cementing his role as both an innovator and a custodian of biodiversity.

What researchers are trying to save

While farmers and nurseries are keeping these mangoes alive on the ground, researchers are working to understand and conserve the diversity within them.

Appemidi mangoes, in particular, are valued for their use in pickles, with fruits and leaves carrying distinct aromas. Sade midi is the plain variety, Jeerige midi has the aroma of cumin, and Karpoor midi has the aroma of camphor.

Comprehensive surveys have been conducted across Karnataka, and over 200 local Appemidi mango genotypes have been collected and conserved in the field gene bank of ICAR-IIHR. Characterisation of these varieties is currently underway at the Institute.

It has also developed cryopreservation techniques to store their pollen for future breeding, and supported efforts to secure a Geographical Indication (GI) tag to protect their identity.

By working closely with farmer groups in Shivamogga and Sirsi, it has helped graft and propagate rare types, ensuring both cultural preservation and livelihood support.

“While wild mango diversity exploration has not been specifically conducted in the coastal regions of Karnataka, Appemidi mango varieties native to the Western Ghats region have been conserved,” says Dr M Sankaran, Principal Scientist & Head, Division of Fruit Crops, ICAR-IIHR, Bengaluru.

Researchers studying coastal Karnataka have confirmed just how variable these native mangoes are. A detailed assessment of wild genotypes in the region found major differences in fruit weight, stone weight, pulp percentage, peel percentage, and leaf traits, proving that this is a broad and valuable genetic pool.

“Wild mangoes of the Western Ghats are known for their distinctive flavours, tastes, and scents,” the study notes, underlining why scientists consider them important conservation material.

This diversity could also prove valuable for the future. Researchers see Appemidi germplasm as a potential resource for breeding disease-resistant and climate-resilient mangoes — connecting the conservation of traditional varieties with the challenges facing agriculture today.

From farms to gene banks and orchards

The conservation effort is also moving beyond individual farmers and nurseries.

In a village of Karnataka’s Mandya district lies the 15-acre Bada Bagh, a living archive of forgotten mangoes.

Its custodian, Syed Ghani, tends to varieties that are commercially unknown yet centuries old. Within its groves stand between 100 and 119 distinct types — many found nowhere else.

Ghani recalls how this orchard once supplied fruit to the palaces of the Mysore maharajas and even to Tipu Sultan himself. After years of painstaking effort, he succeeded in registering 116 of these trees as indigenously collected plant material, securing their place within India’s protected genetic heritage.

The Sirsi-based College of Forestry, too, has helped popularise wild mangoes by moving them from backyard and traditional use into formal conservation, research, and nursery propagation.

It has also worked with farmers, NGOs, and forest departments to keep these indigenous mango varieties in cultivation rather than letting them disappear.

The influence of such conservation efforts has extended into public spaces as well.

In 2025, when Mangaluru’s Pilikula Golf Club set out to plant 4,000 native saplings — among them 180 varieties of wild mango — after clearing the acacias, they turned to the Kodagu-based Chirgura Nursery.

These saplings, carrying the genetic legacy of landscapes from Kasaragod to Uttara Kannada, many of them endangered, are now poised to take root in a new public space.

From individual farms to nurseries, research institutions and public landscapes, the effort is creating more places where Karnataka’s rare mangoes can survive.

More than a mango

For generations, these trees have existed quietly at the edges of farms, in backyards and along forest landscapes. Their value was not always measured by how much money a fruit could fetch in a market.

It lived in the first mangoes of the monsoon, in pickle jars that lasted beyond summer, in local names passed from one generation to another, and in the knowledge of farmers who knew which tree flowered when, which fruit stored well, and which variety could withstand a particular landscape.

Today, that knowledge is finding new life in conservation orchards, nurseries, farms and gene banks.

The work is not about replacing commercial mangoes. It is about ensuring that Karnataka does not lose the extraordinary diversity that existed alongside them.

And with farmers planting new saplings, nurseries propagating rare varieties, researchers conserving their genetic material and institutions creating new spaces for them to grow, these mangoes are no longer surviving only in memory.

From Kukkila’s Maavu Mantapa to scattered orchards across the Ghats, Karnataka’s wild mangoes remind us that heritage is not past — it is living: fruits that bind food, ecology, and memory.

In a land dominated by commercial varieties, these treasures endure for their distinctive character, rooted deeply in the Western Ghats.

To protect them is to safeguard biodiversity and, just as importantly, a way of eating, remembering, and belonging.

There are no synthetic tracks here. No floodlit stadium. No branded jerseys, expensive sports shoes or professional training camps.

Instead, there are gunny sacks, earthen pots, ropes, bows and arrows, mud, wooden sticks and the physical skills that have travelled through generations of the Baiga community.

In Baihar, in Madhya Pradesh’s Balaghat district, these everyday objects become sporting equipment during the Baiga Olympics — a tribal sporting and cultural festival designed around the traditional games of the Baiga people.

The event was first organised in Baihar in 2015 by the Balaghat Tourism Promotion Council, with the stated aim of showcasing traditional Baiga games and helping conserve the community’s cultural heritage. 

Later editions have brought together Baiga participants from Madhya Pradesh and neighbouring states.

A 2020 edition, for instance, was planned over three days and invited Baiga communities from parts of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh.

But who are the Baigas?

The Baigas are one of Madhya Pradesh's Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs)-a special category created to identify tribal communities facing particularly severe socio-economic and infrastructural disadvantages.

India currently recognises 75 PVTGs across 18 states and the Union Territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The classification has historically been based on indicators including low literacy, economic vulnerability, geographical isolation, dependence on subsistence livelihoods, and stagnant or declining population trends. The Baiga are among the PVTGs listed in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

The term itself has an important history. These communities were earlier officially referred to as “Primitive Tribal Groups”, but the terminology was changed to PVTG in 2006–07 because the word “primitive” was considered inappropriate and value-laden.

 They have traditionally lived in close relationship with the forests of central India, particularly across areas of Madhya Pradesh and neighbouring Chhattisgarh. In Madhya Pradesh, large concentrations of the community are found in districts including Mandla and Balaghat.

Their relationship with the forest goes well beyond livelihood.

Baiga communities have traditionally depended on forest resources for food, medicine and other necessities, while maintaining extensive knowledge of local plants and their uses. 

And then there are the games.

Long before the word "Olympics" was attached to them, many of these activities were simply part of community life. The Baiga Olympics takes those games out of the village setting and puts them into a common arena.

So, what exactly happens at the Baiga Olympics?

The answer is wonderfully different from what one might expect from a conventional sporting meet.

Take Bora Daud.

Instead of sprinting down a professional track, participants climb into gunny sacks and race. The humble sack becomes the equivalent of a piece of sporting equipment.

Then there is the Matka race, where participants race while balancing earthen pots. It turns an everyday object into a test of balance, coordination and speed.

Bhalafenk, or spear throwing, draws on the physical precision associated with traditional hunting skills.

Dhanushbaan, involving the bow and arrow, is another important traditional contest. The Madhya Pradesh government lists it among the Baiga Olympics' traditional "hunter games".

There is also Vajni Khel, described as a traditional form of wrestling; Rassa-Kashi, the tug-of-war; and running events including relay and Tritangi races.

The official list of competitions has included Matka Daud, Bora Daud, Tritangi race, relay race, Bhalafenk, Vajni Khel, Lipa-Poti, kabaddi, kho-kho, volleyball, Rassa-Kashi and Dhanushbaan. Earlier editions have also featured games such as Gobardanda.

What do you need to compete?

Not much by modern sporting standards.

A sack for Bora Daud. An earthen pot for the Matka race. A spear for Bhalafenk.

And, most importantly, the knowledge of how to use them.

A special torch also forms part of the event. According to the Balaghat district administration, the torch travels through different districts before reaching Baihar, with a promotional vehicle accompanying it and inviting Baiga youth to participate.

The participants, too, are not necessarily professional athletes.

The Ministry of Tourism describes the event as one where both young and older members of the Baiga community can participate, rather than restricting competition to trained athletes.

A participant does not need years of specialised coaching, a sponsorship deal or access to a stadium. A skill learned through community life can become the basis for competition.

Why does something like this matter? Because indigenous cultures can disappear quietly.

The Baiga Olympics offers one way of keeping some of those practices visible.

People from Baiga community are all set to welcome you to take a sneak peek into their world with Baiga Olympics, Balaghat. The 3 day fiesta from 4th-6th Jan will showcase the rich culture of Baiga tribes of Madhya Pradesh.#MPTourism pic.twitter.com/nsFQWyLVUD

— Madhya Pradesh Tourism (@MPTourism) January 2, 2020

There is also an important question of dignity. For years, tribal communities have often been represented primarily through poverty, remoteness or deprivation. 

The Baiga Olympics attempts to shift the frame.

An Olympics without an Olympic-sized budget

That may ultimately be the most compelling part of the Baiga Olympics. The event borrows the language and spectacle of a global sporting competition, the torch, competitions, teams, spectators and prizes but changes the meaning of what counts as an athlete and what counts as sport.

The Baiga Olympics does not attempt to reproduce the world's Olympics in a forested corner of Madhya Pradesh. It builds a sporting platform around what the community already knows.

Sources:

‘Balaghat to host two-day Baiga Olympics to promote tribal culture’: By Hindustan Times, Published on 18 March 2015

‘Baiga tribe: cuisine and culture’: By Madhya Pradesh Tourism, Published on 12 May 2022

‘Baiga Olympics’: By Government of Madhya Pradesh

Nearly 30 years ago, six tiny pygmy hogs were taken out of the grasslands of Manas in Assam.

There was a good reason. The species had come dangerously close to disappearing, and conservationists feared that leaving the few surviving animals in the wild could mean losing them altogether.

So, in 1996, six pygmy hogs were captured from the Kuribeel grasslands of Manas National Park to start a breeding programme.

This June, their descendants came home.

Fifteen captive-bred pygmy hogs, nine females and six males, were released into the same Kuribeel grasslands. No confirmed signs of the species had been recorded there for the past nine years.

For conservationists who have spent decades trying to bring the animal back from the brink, the release marked a powerful full-circle moment.

Six animals had once been taken from these grasslands to save their species. Today, their descendants are being returned to rebuild a wild population.

Six became 194

The June release was carried out under the Pygmy Hog Conservation Programme (PHCP), which has been working to breed pygmy hogs and return them to suitable habitats in Assam.

Since 2020, six groups have been released in Manas alone. With the latest 15 animals, the number released in the national park has reached 78.

Across Assam, the programme has now bred and reintroduced 194 pygmy hogs.

That number carries particular weight for an animal that was once feared extinct.

The pygmy hog disappeared from much of its historical range during the 20th century and was thought to have vanished altogether before surviving populations were rediscovered.

Captive breeding gave the species a lifeline. The next challenge is much harder: helping these animals live, breed and form self-sustaining populations in the wild.

And there are encouraging signs.

For the first time since the conservation programme began, wild-born pygmy hogs may now outnumber those living in captivity.

That is an important turning point. A species can truly recover when new generations begin surviving and reproducing in the habitat they evolved to live in.

The hogs returning to Kuribeel will now have to do exactly that.

Why this tiny pig matters

A pygmy hog is easy to miss.

Porcula salvania, India’s only endemic wild pig, is among the world’s rarest mammals. Its survival is closely tied to one particular landscape: the tall alluvial grasslands of the Himalayan foothills.

For the pygmy hog, these grasses are home. They provide places to hide, feed, build nests and raise young.

They are also fragile ecosystems.

Habitat loss, invasive plants and human disturbance have altered many of these grasslands. As they shrink or change, animals such as the pygmy hog lose the conditions they need to survive.

This is what makes the animal valuable far beyond its small size.

Conservationists consider the pygmy hog a flagship species for tall grasslands. If these hogs can survive and breed, it is a strong sign that the habitat around them is being protected and restored.

Saving the pygmy hog therefore also means protecting the grasslands it depends on.

And breeding more animals solves only one part of the puzzle. Each release needs suitable habitat waiting at the other end.

Could pygmy hogs return to more parts of India?

For now, much of the pygmy hog’s recovery story has centred on Assam. The next chapter could take the species farther across its former range.

The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has included the pygmy hog in its Species Recovery Programme, with the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) serving as the nodal agency for the conservation project.

The idea is to strengthen existing populations, improve grassland habitats and study whether pygmy hogs could eventually return to places where they once lived.

Potential habitats being considered include Jaldapara in West Bengal and suitable areas in Uttar Pradesh.

Before any animals are released, scientists will need to study these landscapes carefully. They must understand whether enough suitable grassland remains, what threats exist and whether a new population could survive there over the long term.

The Wildlife Institute of India has already shared information on the species’ present status, captive breeding and conservation work with the government’s Wildlife Committee. The committee has recommended scientific assessments across the pygmy hog’s historical range.

In simple terms, the question has moved from “Can we save this species?” to “Can we help it return to more of the places it once called home?”

The journey is still unfolding

Back in Manas, the work continues.

Over the next five years, the PHCP plans to release around 80 more pygmy hogs into the national park. Its longer-term goal is to help build a wild population of around 300 animals by 2040.

The effort brings together the Assam Forest Department, Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, the IUCN SSC Wild Pig Specialist Group, Aaranyak and Ecosystems-India.

For all the organisations, breeding centres and scientific planning involved, the story ultimately comes down to something remarkably simple.

In 1996, conservationists looked at a species with very few animals left and decided there was still time to save it.

They began with six.

Three decades later, the number of pygmy hogs bred and released has reached 194, and descendants of those first animals are walking through Kuribeel once again.

Their future now rests in the grasslands.

If those landscapes remain healthy enough for the pygmy hogs to feed, shelter and raise their young, a species once pushed towards extinction may once again become a familiar part of the wild places it came from.

Sources:

‘Pygmy hog added to national recovery programme to protect alluvial grasslands’: By Jitendra Choubey, Published on 1 August 2026

‘Pygmy Hogs Return Home to Manas After 30 Years’: By Hantigiri Narzary, Published on 7 June 2026

‘Pygmy Hog likely to come under India’s species recovery programme: Environment Ministry’: By Muskan Bhatia, Published on 9 July 2026

What if a petrol pump, puncture shop or even a pond could become a classroom? ❤️

For 31 years, teacher Ujjwala Wadekar has taken education beyond textbooks and four walls in Pathri, Maharashtra. Her students learn through real-life experiences, from repairing punctures to cooking rotis, gaining practical skills that prepare them for life beyond school.

But her teaching doesn’t stop at the classroom. Ujjwala regularly visits students’ homes, works closely with parents and understands the challenges each child faces. The result? Better attendance, stronger parent-school relationships and more confident young learners.

Because sometimes, the best classroom isn’t a classroom at all. 📚✨

#UjjwalaWadekar #TeachersDay #TeachersOfIndia #InnovativeEducation #ExperientialLearning #RuralEducation #EducationForAll #InspiringTeacher #EducationIndia #Maharashtra #InnovativeTeaching #TeachingBeyondClassroom #InspiringIndia #teachersday #TheBetterIndia

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A reaction to an injection left Narayan Jena paralysed when he was just in Class 3. Overnight, he lost the ability to walk, but he never lost his desire to study.

His family tried everything to help him, but when nothing worked, Narayan found his own way forward. He crawled to school, inch by inch, while his brother even carried him for kilometres when he needed help. ❤️

Today, Narayan is the headmaster of Kotlaguda Primary School in rural Odisha. The child who once crawled to class because he refused to give up on education now helps other children discover the same opportunities. His journey is a powerful reminder that sometimes, determination can take you places your circumstances never could.

#NarayanJena #InspiringTeacher #TeacherHeroes #EducationForAll #InspiringIndia #Odisha #OdishaStories #Headmaster #NeverGiveUp #DisabilityInspiration #EducationMatters #RuralEducation #RealLifeHeroes #TheBetterIndia

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On the morning of 26 August, there had been no prolonged rain over the settlements along Nepal’s northern border. Yet far above them, at around 5,200 metres in the Langtang range, the first trigger of a devastating disaster was already taking shape.

A mass of glacier ice and rock broke away from the mountain and plunged down the slope, gathering rock, sediment and debris before entering the Lhende river system.

What began high in the Himalayas quickly became a disaster for communities far downstream. The mountain collapse triggered a sequence of events that moved faster than many settlements below could respond: an ice-rock avalanche, a surge through the river, a debris-filled flood and, eventually, a destructive flow through the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli river systems.

In places, the river rose with frightening speed. The Trishuli climbed by nearly nine metres in about 30 minutes.

The initial assessment found that 19 bridges and roughly 40 kilometres of roads had been damaged or destroyed. More than 430 MW of electricity-generation capacity was knocked offline.

At the time of writing, the death toll had crossed 1,000, while thousands remained unaccounted for. Rescue teams continued searching areas cut off by collapsed roads, damaged bridges and debris.

The numbers capture the scale of the disaster. The way it unfolded tells us something equally important.

A mountain disaster can begin with ice and rock thousands of metres above a settlement. It can enter a river, gather more material as it travels and turn that watercourse into a corridor of destruction.

For India, that brings the warning much closer home.

As roads, towns, hydropower projects and tourism infrastructure expand across the Indian Himalayas, are we designing them for the hazards these mountains could face in the future?

‘Are we developing the Himalayas as though they were the plains?’

When disaster strikes the Himalayas, familiar questions usually follow. Was there too much rain? Did a landslide trigger the flood? What caused the river to rise?

Architect, urban planner and socio-environmentalist Dikshu C Kukreja believes India needs to ask another fundamental question: are we developing the Himalayas as though they were the plains?

Speaking to The Better India, Kukreja argues that India needs to approach Himalayan development on an “urgent war footing”. For him, roads, tunnels, towns, tourism and energy infrastructure all need to be planned around the realities of one of the world’s most fragile mountain systems.

“The Himalayas are not the plains. The topography of mountains is completely different, and it affects the whole landscape,” he tells The Better India.

That difference has to shape decisions on the ground. It influences where a road is built, how a slope is cut, where a town expands and whether a river valley can safely carry another highway, hydropower project or tourist influx.

VIDEO | Manali, Himachal Pradesh: Heavy rain triggers flash floods damage apple orchards in Manali.

(Full video available on PTI Videos - https://t.co/n147TvrpG7)#HimachalPradesh #Manali pic.twitter.com/OuTqbHT30B

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) July 31, 2026

India’s Himalayan Region sits firmly within the country’s development story.

NITI Aayog describes the Indian Himalayan Region as stretching about 2,500 kilometres across 13 States and Union Territories, with nearly 50 million people living there. Roads, towns, tourism economies, hydropower projects, forests and rivers all occupy the same narrow geography.

That is what makes Nepal’s disaster relevant to India.

People have lived in these mountains for generations. Today, the scale and speed of development are changing at the same time as the hazards themselves are changing.

Before drawing a road, understand the mountain

From a distance, the Himalayas can appear immovable. Geologically, they are anything but.

They are a young mountain system, still being shaped by tectonic forces. Steep slopes, fractured rocks, complex drainage and unstable terrain make the region naturally susceptible to landslides, erosion and other geological hazards.

Climate change adds another layer to that instability. For Kukreja, this geological reality needs to become the first principle of Himalayan planning.

“We need to understand that the Himalayas are still forming. They are fragile and young. Yet much of the development conversation still begins with the infrastructure rather than the landscape.”

Those conversations often begin with practical questions. Where should the highway go? How quickly can a journey be shortened? Where can another hotel be built? How much hydropower can the river generate?

Kukreja wants another question to enter that conversation much earlier: what has that intervention done to the mountain?

He says, “the point is not that roads, bridges or power projects should disappear. It is that the mountain should not have to be treated as an obstacle to be engineered away.”

When shorter journeys require bigger mountain cuts

“Consider the highway,” Kukreja says.

“A road that cuts several hours from a journey is easy to measure as development. The economic benefit can be counted. Travel time can be compared before and after construction.”

The effect of cutting into a mountain, however, can extend well beyond the edge of the road. One intervention can place additional pressure on another part of the landscape.

Kukreja is particularly critical of treating reduced travel time as automatic evidence of better mountain planning.

“Tourism departments are proud when they can say they have cut travel time by flattening mountains.”

This is where the difference between planning for the plains and planning for the mountains becomes crucial.

“We cannot keep building Bengaluru and Delhi in the Himalayas.”

A mountain town requires infrastructure designed for its own terrain. The ecological and geological cost of a four-lane road, for instance, can vary enormously from one landscape to another.

The road itself can also become vulnerable to landslides, flash floods or debris flows. When connectivity fails during a disaster, the infrastructure meant to connect a community can leave that community harder to reach.

A road upstream can affect villages downstream

Nepal’s disaster also brings another reality into focus: a river does not recognise administrative boundaries.

The collapse began high in the mountain system. Its consequences travelled through different landscapes and settlements downstream.

The same principle applies in India.

A road project may be approved in one district. A hydropower project may sit further downstream. A forest may lie beyond another administrative boundary. A town may depend on the same river system.

The landscape connects all of them, even when different authorities make decisions about each one.

“You cannot have administrative boundaries for the Himalayas. We have to look at the overall development of the Himalayas.”

For Kukreja, infrastructure therefore needs to be assessed as part of a connected mountain system.

A new road, tunnel, hydropower project, tourism facility or settlement cannot be understood only within its individual project boundary. Planners also need to examine the combined pressure these interventions place on an entire valley.

The question then becomes larger: is the combination of roads, tunnels, hydropower projects, tourism facilities and settlements increasing risk across the landscape they share?

Can yesterday’s records prepare us for tomorrow’s Himalayas?

For decades, infrastructure planning has relied heavily on historical records: past rainfall, past floods, past temperatures and past river behaviour.

Those records tell us what a landscape has already experienced. Kukreja argues that planners also need to understand what it may face in the years ahead.

“We need to understand future trends rather than historical data,” he says.

Future climate projections, he argues, need to be considered alongside the geology of individual landscapes.

“We have to carefully study the repercussions of the geological situation.”

Nepal’s disaster shows why this matters. The trigger occurred high above the settlements, while the destruction travelled through a river corridor far downstream.

Infrastructure built anywhere along such a corridor therefore has to account for risks that may originate far beyond its immediate surroundings.

How do we decide where construction should stop?

After a catastrophe, attention often turns towards drawing lines on maps and identifying areas where construction should be restricted.

But where should that line begin? What should determine it?

Kukreja believes these decisions require a detailed understanding of individual landscapes.

“No-build zones alone make no sense.”

He argues that authorities need to examine the condition of each area before deciding where development can safely take place and where restrictions are needed.

That makes decisions about construction deeply local. The condition of the slope, its soil, erosion, tree cover and geology all become part of understanding how much development a particular landscape can carry.

Mountain communities need development. What should it look like?

Any conversation about Himalayan infrastructure eventually returns to the people who already live there.

Mountain communities need roads. They need hospitals, schools, electricity, jobs and communications. Tourism supports livelihoods, while connectivity can reduce isolation and improve access to opportunities.

Kukreja is clear about their right to that progress.

“People living there have every right to progress economically.”

Having worked on several government projects over the years, I have identified key challenges within such projects.

Here are my thoughts on navigating bureaucracy, dealing with regulations, and effectively collaborating with stakeholders — all while prioritising the public good. pic.twitter.com/DifD73G4WH

— Dikshu Kukreja (@DikshuKukreja) January 21, 2025

The important question, for him, is the form that progress takes.

“Development must happen, but it must be micro-development, not mega-development.”

That could mean smaller, distributed interventions rather than concentrating enormous infrastructure within narrow valleys.

It could mean asking whether every tourist destination requires a larger road, whether every peak needs unrestricted access, whether parking and traffic can be managed before another highway is widened, and whether infrastructure can respond to the terrain rather than forcing the terrain to conform to it.

That brings the discussion back to one of the most visible symbols of Himalayan development: the highway.

“There is no need to create four- or eight-lane highways everywhere. We need to do better traffic management.”

For Kukreja, better traffic management can sometimes reduce the pressure to keep adding concrete to mountain landscapes.

Can smaller projects offer another way?

Kukreja points to examples beyond India to make his broader argument about scale.

He cites Albania’s mountainous border region with southern Greece, where hydropower development has included multiple smaller projects rather than relying entirely on mega-scale sites.

“They understood the ecology.”

For Kukreja, the example points towards the possibility of distributing infrastructure, reducing the scale of individual interventions and working within ecological limits.

“There are enough examples in the world to learn from. We have to find smart solutions to coexist with nature.”

What should an Indian Himalayan town of the future look like?

The question may ultimately come down to where planning begins.

Instead of starting with the infrastructure India already knows how to build and asking the Himalayas to accommodate it, planners can begin with the landscape and ask what kind of infrastructure it can safely support.

That means studying the whole valley rather than a single project boundary.

“We have to look at upstream and downstream development together.”

Nepal’s disaster has made that connection visible in the most difficult possible way.

Some mountain hazards will remain beyond human control. The amount of exposure created through development, however, is something India can influence.

Kukreja sees this as an institutional and social challenge.

“We cannot hold back development. But we have to change the mindset of the authorities and also the citizens.”

“We need to get out of bureaucratic lethargy and take a unified approach.”

For India’s Himalayan towns, that shift asks planners, governments and citizens to look at development through a different lens: begin with the mountain, understand the valley around it, and then decide what can safely be built there.

Because the infrastructure rising across the Himalayas today will have to live with the mountains of tomorrow.

The dosa lands on the hot tawa with a soft sizzle.

Ganesh Sathe spreads the batter into a thin circle, lets it crisp at the edges and then adds a generous spoonful of butter. It is a simple sight, but for Ganesh, this dosa is much more than food.

It is the recipe he grew up eating. His mother’s recipe. And, as he would eventually discover, the recipe that would change his life.

Today, nearly 400 people visit his shop in Thane every day, and the business makes close to Rs 40,000 a day. But Ganesh’s journey to this point had not been smooth.

From CA preparation to a dosa cart

Like many Indian parents, Ganesh’s family had a fairly straightforward dream for him: become a chartered accountant, build a stable career and do well in life.

Ganesh tried and began preparing for his CA exams, but somewhere along the way, he found himself thinking more and more about something completely different.

His mother’s benne dosa.

He had grown up eating it and always felt there was something special about the recipe. Perhaps, he thought, other people would love it too.

So he took a chance.

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Ganesh left his CA preparation midway, borrowed Rs 50,000 and bought an old cart. Soon, he and his sister Sapna were standing behind a tiny dosa stall in Thane.

The dream, however, did not immediately look like a dream.

When a Rs 200 day almost ended the dream

The siblings were surrounded by flashy food trucks selling momos, pizza rolls and all kinds of trendy food. Their humble dosa cart struggled to get noticed.

Some days, they made just Rs 200.

The losses kept piling up. The pressure became overwhelming, and Ganesh and Sapna broke down. The cart was close to being shut for good.

But before they gave up, they decided to give themselves one final chance.

They turned to social media.

They rebuilt the cart, worked on making their dosas better and began sharing their journey online. At home, their mother and Sapna prepared fresh batter every morning. At the cart, Ganesh made the dosas himself.

And slowly, something changed.

People began noticing the little stall and the story behind it.

Followers turned into customers. Customers brought more customers. Before long, the dosa that had struggled to find takers was selling out within an hour.

A mother's recipe finds a much bigger table

Today, that old cart has become a permanent shop. Around 400 people visit every day, and the business earns nearly Rs 12 lakh a month.

But perhaps the sweetest part of Ganesh’s success is that it all began with something that was already close to home.

A recipe his mother had lovingly made for her family was now being enjoyed by hundreds of people.

Ganesh may have stepped away from the career everyone expected him to choose, but in doing so, he found something of his own, a business built on family, faith and a willingness to keep going when things did not work out the first time.

Sometimes, a big dream does not begin with a big investment or a perfect plan. Sometimes, it begins with something as simple as a mother’s recipe and a son who believes it deserves a place in the world.

On 26 August, catastrophic floods swept through parts of Nepal, leaving hundreds dead and thousands missing as swollen rivers tore through communities.

The floodwaters surged through the Trishuli and Narayani river systems before entering India as the Gandak. As the Himalayan disaster moved towards Bihar, the state faced the threat of a massive influx of water.

At Valmikinagar, however, engineers had a crucial piece of infrastructure on their side: the 57-year-old Gandak Barrage.

As the flood surge intensified, engineers opened all 36 gates of the barrage, releasing nearly 1.5 lakh cusecs of water in a controlled manner. The aim was to manage the enormous volume of water flowing downstream and prevent an even more destructive surge from overwhelming the region.

The intervention did come at a cost.

Low-lying areas of West Champaran were flooded, agricultural fields went underwater, and families had to be evacuated from vulnerable areas. But the barrage helped regulate the incoming water at a critical moment, potentially reducing the impact of the Himalayan flood surge on downstream communities.

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Without such regulation, an unchecked surge could have inundated larger stretches of Bihar, damaged vast areas of farmland and deposited huge quantities of Himalayan silt across the plains. Communities in vulnerable areas would also have had far less time to respond.

Built to manage the worst

The Gandak Barrage was constructed as part of the 1959 Gandak Agreement between India and Nepal, with the broader Gandak river system being developed to regulate water and support irrigation across the region.

Located at Valmikinagar in West Champaran, the barrage has spent decades controlling the flow of one of the major rivers entering Bihar from the Himalayan region.

Its importance becomes particularly evident during extreme weather events, when enormous volumes of water can move rapidly from the mountains into the plains.

More than half a century after it was built, the barrage once again became a critical line of defence when a Himalayan flood disaster reached India's doorstep.

For the communities downstream, it was a reminder that infrastructure built decades ago can play a crucial role when nature unleashes its most powerful forces.

At Valmikinagar, 36 gates opened against the flood — helping engineers manage a surge that began hundreds of kilometres away in the mountains.

A 57-year-old structure stood between a raging river and the vulnerable plains of Bihar.

Source- 

‘Bihar on alert as Nepal floods raise Gandak surge threat, all 36 barrage gates opened’, by PTI, published in Telangana Today on 26 August 2026

‘Nepal Floods: Why Bihar and Uttar Pradesh Are Now on Alert | The Palki Sharma Show | IGR’

‘Flood fears in Bihar as several rivers cross danger marks amid Nepal rains’: by Lairenlakpam Warli; Published on 31 August 2026

A kayak moves into one of Pichavaram’s narrow creeks. As we go deeper, the waterway gets smaller. Mangrove roots rise from the mud on both sides, while the branches above begin to form a canopy around us.

There is no walking trail here. The only way to explore this part of the forest is from the water.

As we paddle ahead, the wider channels slowly disappear. The trees grow thicker, the creek gets narrower, and the mangroves feel close enough to reach out and touch.

This is the part of Tamil Nadu’s Pichavaram village that tourists remember.

It is also the part that made me wonder what tourism here is really doing for the forest and for the people who depend on it.

Across India’s coast, mangroves are slowly becoming destinations in their own right. Visitors take boat rides through Bhitarkanika in Odisha, watch birds around Kadalundi in Kerala, kayak through the backwaters of coastal Karnataka and enter the maze-like waterways of Pichavaram in Tamil Nadu.

The appeal is easy to understand once you are inside one.

But there is a bigger question behind the experience: if tourists are willing to pay to see a healthy mangrove, can that money help the people living around it earn from protecting the forest?

A small part of India, doing a very big job

India has 4,991.68 sq km of mangrove cover, according to the India State of Forest Report 2023. That is only 0.15% of the country’s geographical area.

West Bengal has the largest share, followed by Gujarat and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Karnataka, in comparison, has just 14.20 sq km.

Their footprint may be small, but the work mangroves do is enormous.

Their roots slow waves and hold sediment together, helping protect vulnerable coastlines from erosion. Their creeks become breeding and nursery grounds for fish and other aquatic species. Their waterlogged soils can also store large amounts of carbon.

For people living beside these forests, mangroves can support fishing, protect shorelines and shape everyday livelihoods.

Tourism introduces another possibility.

What if a mangrove could generate income simply because people wanted to experience it alive?

When keeping the forest healthy begins to pay

You can already see glimpses of this in coastal Karnataka.

Around Saligrama and the backwaters of Udupi, tourists can kayak through mangrove-lined waterways and wetlands. A few hours on the water may mean income for a boat operator or guide. The same visitor may stay in a local homestay, eat nearby or buy something from a small shop.

The money starts moving through the community without requiring the mangrove to be cut or harvested.

Research suggests that this can support conservation when local communities genuinely benefit.

A 2024 review published in the Journal of Environmental Management examined studies on mangrove ecotourism in Southeast Asia between 2010 and 2022. It found that activities including boat tours, wildlife watching, kayaking and mangrove planting were increasingly being used around these ecosystems.

Several studies linked tourism income with greater community participation in conservation and restoration.

But one condition kept appearing: local people needed to receive a meaningful share of the benefits.

That is where the idea becomes interesting for India.

What changes when a boat ride becomes a livelihood?

The Sundarbans offer one clue.

Economists Indrila Guha and Santadas Ghosh studied whether tourism could improve livelihoods in a remote island village in the Indian Sundarbans.

Tourism there was seasonal, and few households depended on it entirely. Still, people who worked as boatmen, guides and vendors were economically better off than those who did not participate in tourism.

The study also found that tourism-dependent households relied less on forest resources.

For a family living beside a protected forest, that matters. If guiding visitors, running boat trips or selling food becomes a meaningful source of income, there may be less pressure to depend directly on whatever can be taken from the forest.

But income has to be reliable enough to matter.

That thought came back to me halfway through my kayak ride in Pichavaram.

The extra Rs 500

Pichavaram lies between the Vellar and Coleroon estuaries in Tamil Nadu and is already one of India’s best-known mangrove tourism destinations.

Visitors can choose motorboats through the larger waterways or kayaks that can enter narrower creeks.

The kayaks showed us a completely different side of the forest. As the creek narrowed, the experience became slower, closer and far more immersive.

When we had booked the ride, however, we were told that we would be taken only up to a certain point.

Once we were already on the water, the boatman mentioned another place farther inside. It was, he told us, especially beautiful and had apparently been used as a shooting location.

We could go there too, he said, for another Rs 500.

My first reaction was irritation. Why was this being offered only after the trip had started?

But the more I thought about it, the more that small exchange began to reveal something larger.

Pichavaram is seasonal. When tourist numbers drop during the monsoon, boatmen and others who depend on visitors have fewer trips and fewer opportunities to earn.

If your income depends on who arrives that day, another Rs 500 from one group can matter.

The issue, then, becomes bigger than one informal charge. It points to a tourism system where the visitor does not always know what they are paying for, while the person taking them through the forest may not know how much they will earn that day.

What if the system worked differently?

Imagine arriving at Pichavaram and seeing clearly listed routes, prices and timings.

A visitor could choose a standard trip or a longer creek experience before getting into the boat. The boatman would know exactly how much of that fee he would receive. A fixed portion could go towards protecting the mangrove itself.

That money could help with restoration, waste management or monitoring. Sensitive creeks could be closed when needed. Visitor numbers could be capped in fragile stretches. Kayaks and other low-impact options could be encouraged where appropriate.

The tourist still gets the experience they came for. The boatman earns more predictably. The forest also benefits from every ticket sold.

That matters because tourism can damage the landscape it depends on.

Motorboats can bring engine noise, underwater vibration and the risk of fuel pollution. Too many visitors entering sensitive areas can disturb wildlife or damage vegetation. Waste and unmanaged footfall can add another layer of pressure.

A mangrove can support tourism only when tourism respects its limits.

What should remain after the tourist leaves?

Perhaps the success of mangrove tourism should be measured by something other than visitor numbers.

Are local residents earning fairly? Are boat numbers controlled? Are sensitive areas protected? Does part of the money tourists spend return to restoration and monitoring? And, over time, is the mangrove healthier?

India has already begun linking mangrove restoration with livelihoods through the Mangrove Initiative for Shoreline Habitats & Tangible Incomes, or MISHTI, launched in 2023.

That connection stayed with me after Pichavaram.

I remember paddling into those narrow creeks, with the mangrove closing around us and the wider world disappearing behind the bends.

I also remember the extra Rs 500.

One moment showed me why people would travel to experience these forests. The other showed me how much the people taking us there need tourism to work better for them.

Perhaps mangroves do not need tourists simply to arrive in greater numbers. They need a model in which every visit leaves something useful behind: a fairer livelihood for the people who live alongside the forest, and a stronger reason to ensure the mangroves remain standing when the next kayak enters the creek.

Sources:

‘Does Tourism Contribute to Local Livelihoods? A Case Study of Tourism, Poverty and Conservation in the Indian Sundarbans’: By Indrila Guha, Santadas Ghosh, Published in January 2008

‘Ecotourism and mangrove conservation in Southeast Asia: Current trends and perspectives’: By Journal of Environmental Management, Published on 3 July 2024 

‘West Bengal plans sustainable wildlife and mangrove tourism in Sundarbans’: By Jayatri Nag, Published on 28 July 2026 

For Sonika Bhasin, sustainability is not something she wants her children to learn from textbooks. She believes they can understand it simply by being part of everyday life.

Sonika, who runs the Instagram page @sonikabhasin, shares easy ways to live more sustainably. Her content includes composting, making bioenzymes, reducing waste, and raising children with a greater understanding of nature.

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At her home in Mumbai, composting has become a part of her son’s childhood. He has been doing it since he was just two years old.

The process is easy. Kitchen waste goes into the composter, followed by a layer of what are known as browns. She uses cocopeat for this. The mixture is then covered and left to do its work.

For her son, though, composting is much more than putting food scraps into a container.

A lesson that happens naturally

Over time, he has watched the compost change and has come across maggots and grubs along the way. Instead of being taught to fear these creatures, he has learnt what they do and why they are important to nature.

“He knows the life cycle of maggots and grubs,” she says. “He knows these creatures are an essential part of our ecosystem and not to be feared.”

For children, experiences like these can make ideas about nature easier to understand. They can see that food waste does not disappear once it leaves the kitchen. It breaks down and becomes part of another cycle.

Sonika says her son has begun to understand this circularity without her having to formally teach it to him. She also sees composting as something that children can genuinely enjoy. They get to take part, watch the changes, and slowly understand what is happening around them.

For her, that is the beauty of involving children in sustainable living. It does not always need to begin with a lesson. Sometimes, it can begin with a composter at home and a child who is inquisitive enough to look inside.

For over 4,000 years, farmers across the Indian subcontinent extracted a deep blue pigment from the unassuming leaves of Indigofera tinctoria, fermenting and oxidising them in vats until colourless indican turned into vivid dye. 

It was a craft so painstaking, and its result so coveted that traders travelling the Silk Road called it indikon, the Greek word for "from India." By the 17th century, Portuguese, Dutch and British merchants were fighting over it, and the pigment had earned a nickname that captured its worth precisely: blue gold.

A colour built on coercion

For those who actually grew it, indigo told a very different story. As the East India Company tightened its hold over Bengal and Bihar, European planters forced peasants into agreements that left them with almost no choice. 

Under what became known as the tinkathia system, tenant farmers were compelled to cultivate indigo on three-twentieths of their landholding, usually their most fertile plots, and to sell the crop back to planters at prices fixed well below its market value. 

Loans advanced for the purpose came with punishing interest, trapping generations of ryots in debt they could never clear. Indigo cultivation in Bengal had begun in 1777, and within decades it had become one of the most exploitative arrangements of the colonial economy.

By the summer of 1859, that exploitation reached breaking point. In the Nadia district of Bengal, peasants led by Digambar Biswas and Bishnu Biswas simply refused to sow indigo, and the resistance spread rapidly to Jessore, Pabna and Murshidabad. 

Farmers went on strike, boycotted planters and, in several places, attacked indigo factories outright. 

The playwright Dinabandhu Mitra captured their suffering in Nil Darpan, a Bengali play so effective at exposing the brutality of the system that its English translator, the missionary James Long, was jailed for publishing it. 

The uprising forced the colonial government to convene the Indigo Commission in 1860, whose findings were damning enough that indigo cultivation collapsed across Bengal within the year, with many planters shutting their factories for good.

The dye that made a mahatma

The planters who left Bengal simply moved west into Bihar, where the same tinkathia system persisted for decades more. It was here, in the Champaran district, that indigo's story took its most consequential turn. 

In 1917, an indigo cultivator named Raj Kumar Shukla persuaded a lawyer recently returned from South Africa to see the farmers' conditions for himself. 

That lawyer was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and his visit to Champaran became the first satyagraha he ever led on Indian soil.

Gandhi refused to leave when British officials ordered him out, an act of quiet defiance that made headlines nationwide. He then gathered testimony from more than 8,000 farmers, documenting the abuses of the tinkathia system in painstaking detail. 

Under mounting pressure, the government appointed an inquiry committee and, remarkably, made Gandhi a member. 

The committee's findings led directly to the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1918, which abolished forced indigo cultivation, refunded a portion of the illegal payments extracted from farmers, and made growing indigo entirely voluntary. Within a few years, most European planters had left the region altogether.

Blue reclaimed

Champaran did more than free one district's farmers. It proved that organised, non-violent resistance could force the British Empire to bend, and it gave Gandhi the method he would use for the rest of India's freedom struggle. 

That same spirit later found its way into khadi, the hand-spun cloth Gandhi championed as a rejection of colonial industry, often dyed in the very indigo that had once symbolised exploitation.

Today, that transformation continues in dye pits and workshops across India, where artisans reviving natural indigo dyeing are turning a colour once forced upon their ancestors into a source of livelihood and pride, one vat at a time.

Sources:

'Champaran Satyagraha 1917, Leaders, Significance, UPSC Notes': for Vajiram & Ravi, Published on 2026

'Indigo Revolt 1859, History, Causes, Outcomes, UPSC Notes': for Vajiram & Ravi, Published on 2026

'Champaran Satyagraha (1917): Gandhi's First Indian Satyagraha': by Anantam IAS, Published on 2026

He had ₹800, a leaking cowshed and four children who had nowhere else to go.Today, Uttam Teron’s Parijat Academy has educated 2,000+ children, including students who have gone on to become police officers.

What started with no funding, no teachers and just four children grew into a school for children from remote villages, giving them access to education, skills and a chance to dream bigger.

Uttam didn’t just build a school. He built a path to a better future. ❤️

To support the education of underprivileged children at Parijat Academy, connect at +91 9954778447.

@teron.uttam

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Ishan Pathak still remembers the moments before vultures arrived at a carcass.

First, there was a brief pause over the remains.

Then came the movement: wings cutting through dry air, hooked beaks pulling at flesh, birds gathering around the carcass with startling precision.

Standing in the countryside of Jaisalmer, surrounded by dust and decay, Ishan watched what he describes as the largest congregation of vultures he had ever seen.

“It’s probably something many people may never witness again,” he reflects, recalling the sight of over 100 vultures from four different species gathered around a carcass. 

For the wildlife photographer, vultures carry no sense of omen or horror.

They are among the most important workers in the natural world: cleaners of landscapes, preventers of disease, and indicators of ecological health.

This belief has taken him across India’s forests, deserts, grasslands, and mountains, where he documents species that continue to vanish from the skies. 

Out of the 23 vulture species found globally, nine species reside in or migrate to India, making India home to the highest diversity of vulture species in the world. Ishan managed to photograph all the nine species spread across India.

Before the camera, there was a life in medicine 

Long before he began photographing wildlife full-time, Ishan’s life was shaped by medicine and military service.

He earned his medical degree in China, later completed an MD in public health in Karnataka, and worked as an assistant professor in Kerala before joining the Indian Air Force as a specialist medical officer. In 2024, he retired as a squadron leader after five years of service and chose to pursue wildlife photography full-time. 

For more than a decade and a half, his professional life revolved around hospitals, classrooms, and military discipline.

But forests had always been close to Ishan.

As a child, he loved visiting national parks. They gave him a break from routine, and over time, those visits became something he kept returning to.

The more he travelled, the more he began to notice the small details of the wild: how animals moved, how birds behaved, and how every species had a role to play.

Those journeys slowly changed the way he looked at wildlife, and eventually, the direction of his life.

Today, Ishan, now 37, works as a full-time wildlife photographer, documenting species and ecosystems under pressure.

And among all the birds and animals he has photographed, vultures have stayed with him the most.

Looking at carcasses through the lens of a doctor as much as a photographer, Ishan began to see what most people overlooked. 

"If these birds hadn't been here, that carcass would have remained for days, attracting feral dogs and increasing the risk of disease," he says. "People see something ugly, but I see one of nature's most efficient public health workers." That shift in perspective stayed with him. 

Ever since, he has sought out vultures across India, determined to document the birds beyond the fear, myths, and stigma that have long defined their image.

Of the 23 vulture species found globally, nine reside in or migrate to India, giving the country a rich diversity of vulture species.

Ishan has managed to photograph all nine species found in India.

Seeing vultures beyond fear and folklore 

Among the images Ishan has captured over the years, one frame continues to define his work: a cinereous vulture feeding on the exposed heart of a mongoose in Rajasthan’s desert landscape. 

His images are not designed to romanticise wildlife. Instead, they force viewers to confront the role death plays in sustaining ecosystems.

For Ishan, photographing vultures is about documenting the raw mechanics of survival, like feeding behaviour and carcass ecology.

“There’s so much involved when vultures are feeding,” he explains, describing how intensely focused the birds become around carcasses. That concentration has often allowed him to photograph them from unusually close distances, especially in open countryside settings.

His images also challenge a common misunderstanding surrounding vultures.

These birds are among the most efficient protectors of ecosystems. 

When a carcass is left out in the open, vultures are often the first to do the difficult work. They clean it up before it can rot for days, attract more scavengers, or become a source of disease for nearby forests, villages, and animals. 

Yet despite their importance, India’s vultures have suffered one of the sharpest wildlife declines recorded anywhere in the world. A Wildlife Institute of India assessment found nesting in only 120 of 425 historical vulture sites, showing how sharply their old nesting range has shrunk. 

A major reason behind this decline was diclofenac, a painkiller once widely used on cattle. For the animals, it treated pain. But when vultures fed on the carcasses of treated animals, even a small trace could kill them. That one drug went on to wipe out huge numbers of vultures across several species. 

For Ishan, the vulture crisis became real through the places he travelled to.

He saw it in mountain villages, where carcasses once drew birds from the sky. He saw it in desert fields, where a feeding site could still reveal what India was losing. He saw it again in forests, where spotting a vulture had become far rarer than it should be.

One of those journeys took him to Kibber in Himachal Pradesh.

Kibber, Himachal Pradesh: The bearded vulture of the cold desert

In the high-altitude landscape of Kibber, Ishan photographed the bearded vulture, also known as the lammergeier, soaring across the cold desert skies.

The bearded vulture is the only known vertebrate whose diet consists mainly of bone and bone marrow, which makes up 70 to 90 percent of what it eats.

It is the only living bird species that specialises in feeding on bones.

When a bone is too large to swallow, the bearded vulture carries it in flight to a height of 50 to 150 m above the ground and drops it onto rocks below. This breaks the bone into smaller pieces and exposes the nutritious marrow. It can fly with bones up to 10 cm in diameter and weighing over 4 kg, nearly equal to its own weight.

After dropping large bones, the bearded vulture spirals or glides down to inspect them and may repeat the act if the bone has not cracked enough. This learned skill requires extensive practice by immature birds and can take up to seven years to master. Its old name, ossifrage, meaning “bone breaker”, comes from this habit.

Unlike most vultures, the bearded vulture does not have a bald head. Its creamy-coloured forehead contrasts with a black band across the eyes and lores, while bristles under the chin form the black beard that gives the species its English name.

Though still relatively widespread in the northern Himalayas, threats from poisoned carcasses, shrinking food availability, and habitat disturbance continue to grow across fragile mountain ecosystems.

Jaisalmer, Rajasthan: Desert landscapes and migratory giants

Every winter, the deserts of Jaisalmer become a refuge for migratory vultures arriving from Central Asia and Europe.

Here, Ishan documented the cinereous vulture, one of the world’s heaviest flying birds. Large, dark, and often seen alone, the cinereous vulture faces danger across its long journeys. Poisoned carcasses, power lines, and fewer safe feeding sites all make survival harder for this migratory bird. 

Jaisalmer also became the setting for some of Ishan’s most haunting images.

Among them was the endangered Egyptian vulture, smaller than most of its relatives but highly intelligent and adaptable. Known for its white plumage and yellow facial skin, the bird scavenges around villages, scrublands, and carcass sites.

For Ishan, the photograph of the cinereous vulture feeding on a mongoose carcass reflected both the brutality and necessity of scavenging in the wild. 

Another migratory species Ishan photographed in Rajasthan was the Eurasian griffon vulture. 

These social scavengers descend in groups around carcasses, using their broad wings to glide enormous distances across arid terrain. While globally more stable than some Indian vulture species, migratory populations still face threats from poisoned feeding grounds and collisions with power lines.

Kaziranga, Assam: Photographing a disappearing scavenger

In Assam’s Kaziranga landscape, Ishan photographed one of India’s most threatened scavengers, the critically endangered slender-billed vulture.

Once widespread across the Gangetic plains, the species suffered catastrophic declines following diclofenac contamination. Characterised by its narrow bill and elongated neck, the bird now survives in fragmented pockets near riverine forests and grasslands.

This makes landscapes like Kaziranga especially important. For conservationists, they are among the few places where the species still has a chance to survive.

For Ishan, photographing the bird here carried a deeper purpose. Each frame became a reminder of the role vultures still play in keeping forests clean, disease in check, and ecosystems balanced across northern India.

Nagarhole, Karnataka: A once-common bird now fighting to survive 

At Nagarhole National Park, Ishan photographed the white-rumped vulture, once among the most common scavenging birds in the country.

Identified by the distinct white patch near its lower back, the species experienced a population collapse of more than 95 percent during the 1990s. According to the Vulture Conservation Foundation, this crash devastated a species once considered the world’s most abundant large bird of prey, altering local ecosystems in the process. 

Conservation efforts have helped some populations recover, but the species is still at risk from harmful veterinary drugs, contaminated carcasses, and habitat loss. 

For Ishan, the bird’s decline represents one of the starkest reminders of how quickly ecological collapse can unfold when a single toxic factor enters the food chain.

Dudhwa, Uttar Pradesh: Meet the red-headed king vulture

In Dudhwa National Park, Ishan photographed the red-headed vulture, also known as the Asian king vulture, a solitary scavenger marked by deep black plumage and a bare crimson head. 

Once common across the Indian subcontinent, the species is now critically endangered.

With fewer safe places to feed, shrinking habitats, and the risk of poisoning, the red-headed vulture is finding it harder to survive. But in the forest, its role is still irreplaceable. It clears away the dead, keeps the landscape cleaner, and helps the wild stay in balance. 

Capturing ecological moments before they vanish

Over the years, Ishan’s equipment evolved alongside his work.

He began photographing wildlife using a Nikon setup with a 200–500 mm lens before later upgrading to a 600 mm f/4 lens, allowing him to capture feeding behaviour and close interactions in greater detail.

But for him, the camera is only a tool.

What matters more are the moments it preserves.

“These are moments people may never see again,” he reflects.

In Ishan’s photographs, vultures are no longer shadows of death circling overhead. They are the birds doing the work no one else can: cleaning what we leave behind, stopping disease before it spreads, and reminding us that losing them would mean losing one of nature’s most important safeguards.

Born blind in a tiny village in Bundelkhand, Madhya Pradesh, 25-year-old Suneel Lodhi found what he couldn't find through sight — his voice. 🌱 From singing bhajans and Bundeli folk songs at village gatherings and local trains to his songs crossing millions of views online, Suneel's journey took an extraordinary turn when filmmaker Pankaj VRK discovered him.

Today, his voice features in Hanuman Ansh with "Maine Tere Hi Bharose." From local trains to the big screen, Suneel's story is one of hope, talent and perseverance. ❤️

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As the sun rises over the dry stretches of southern Tamil Nadu, silhouettes begin appearing against rows of towering palm trees. Some carry ropes coiled around their shoulders. Others carry sickles and woven baskets.

For generations, these climbers have scaled palmyra trees before dawn, tapping sap, harvesting fruit, and collecting leaves that would eventually become everything from jaggery and handicrafts to sweets and roof coverings.

Today, many of them are in their seventies.

And that worries Dr Preethi Hari Babu.

“Without community support, the tree cannot be protected. That is the charm of the palmyra — the community and the tree survive together,” says the 30-year-old tourism researcher and assistant professor from Chennai, whose doctoral research has focused on understanding how Tamil Nadu’s state tree can be revived through tourism and community engagement.

“I have hosted three tours. In each tour, nearly 20 to 30 people participated. Most of them did not know about the community and their livelihoods. They were overwhelmed to learn about them, purchased the products, and even saved their contacts to place orders in the future,” shares Dr Preethi.

A journey that began in a classroom

For Preethi, the journey into the world of palmyra did not begin in forests or farms. It began in classrooms.

After completing her bachelor’s degree at Ethiraj College and later pursuing an MBA in Tourism, she entered the tourism sector, believing that every place has something unique that shapes its identity. While working with a nature conservation NGO in 2019, she joined a trail focused on palmyra landscapes.

That changed everything.

“When I understood the benefits of the tree and saw communities trying to revive it, I realised there was so much more to explore,” she says.

The idea stayed with her long after the trail ended.

Eventually, while pursuing her PhD in Tourism from Mizoram University, which she completed in 2025, she turned the palmyra tree into the centre of her research — not just as a species, but as an ecosystem connecting livelihoods, ecology, culture, and identity.

More than just a tree

Across Tamil Nadu, palmyra trees stand along roadsides, fields, and coastal landscapes. But according to Preethi, reducing them to scenery misses their significance.

Large communities depend on the tree directly for income.

“There are edible and non-edible products. There are handicrafts, exports, climbers who harvest products, and women who make jaggery. It creates employment at many levels,” she explains.

Women’s collectives produce palm jaggery and craft products. Climbers harvest sap and fruit. Artisans weave leaves into baskets and utility products. Entrepreneurs make jams, squashes, and sweets from palm fruit.

And then there is the environmental role.

The tree helps reduce soil erosion, supports water retention, and acts as a habitat for multiple species. In coastal and dry landscapes especially, these ecological functions become critical.

“It is not only useful for people. Many species survive because of these landscapes too,” she says.

Where livelihoods climb trees

During her fieldwork across Kanyakumari, Thoothukudi, and Villupuram, Preethi spent time with climbing communities whose relationship with palmyra stretches across generations.

“There are huge climber communities, almost like fishing communities. Their identity and livelihoods are deeply connected to this tree,” she says.

One such climber is 32-year-old Anto Brito, whose family has worked with palmyra trees for generations.

“My grandfather was a climber, and my father was also in this profession,” he says. “After my studies, I got a job elsewhere, but I did not find satisfaction there. Here, I am physically fit, I am with my family, and I enjoy the work.”

His family remains deeply involved in the palmyra economy. While Anto climbs the trees and harvests sap and fruit, his parents prepare food products made from palmyra produce. Together, they also run two shops that sell handicrafts and food items derived from the tree.

But what struck Preethi most was how invisible many of these value chains remain.

Many people know palm fruit. Few know how much more exists.

From neera-based beverages to jams, squashes, jelly, adhirasam, and paniyaram, communities continue creating products that rarely receive mainstream attention.

For climbers like Anto, the work remains seasonal but can provide a meaningful income. Between April and October, he harvests enough sap to produce around two to three kilograms of karupatti (palm jaggery) a day, earning roughly Rs 1,000 daily during the season.

“In a day, I climb more than 10 trees,” he says. “During the COVID period, I used to climb nearly 20 trees a day.”

To change perceptions around palmyra products, Preethi began organising palmyra trails and community events.

One of them was a fruit festival organised with local communities and hosted at Madras School of Social Work, where artisans and producers from Villupuram showcased dishes made from palmyra produce.

“About 150 people came and tried the food. Many had never tasted these products before,” she says.

The moment that changed perspective

One experience continues to stay with her.

As part of her extended research, Preethi travelled through remote islands in Indonesia for 15 days, studying how communities there interacted with similar palm ecosystems.

Instead of feeling distant, it felt familiar.

“I was proud that this potential already existed in Tamil Nadu,” she says.

Communities there used palm trees for food, crafts, and even musical instruments.

“That was when I realised this tree connects communities across Asia. The community involvement travels with the tree.”

Rote and Sabu are remote islands in Indonesia. They conserve the palmyra — known locally as lontar — in every possible way.

“More than conservation, I can say they co-exist with the tree. Sasando is a traditional harp-like musical instrument native to Rote Island, made from lontar. It is considered a symbol of identity, culture, heritage, and pride. You can see its influence everywhere on the island, from heritage monuments to modern décor inspired by its shape. There is even a Sasando-shaped building that serves as the official residence of the Governor of East Nusa Tenggara in Kupang.

“Sabu Island is mostly covered with grasslands and lontar palms. The majority of people depend on the tree for their livelihoods. They make intricate handicrafts such as baskets and handbags, while also preserving their traditional products.

“Namata village in Sabu has conical lontar-thatched houses, where visitors can observe animist and ancestral worship practices. Visitors can also experience ikat weaving and watch climbers collect sap from the trees, locally called tuak. The area is underdeveloped in terms of infrastructure, amenities, and sanitation facilities, but it is remarkably well-maintained and organised.”

The benefits are directly shared among the community and supported by the government. For Preethi, it serves as one of the strongest examples of community-based tourism.

How tourism can help revive community livelihoods

For Preethi, tourism is ultimately about empowering communities by sustaining their livelihoods.

“Community-based tourism can create additional economic opportunities while helping communities showcase their culture and knowledge systems,” she says.

Visitors could experience both the edible and non-edible worlds of the palmyra ecosystem — tasting fresh palm products and traditional foods while also learning how leaves are transformed into handicrafts, utility products, and decorative items through skills passed down across generations.

The benefits, she believes, extend far beyond tourism revenue.

Women who already play a central role in producing jaggery, food products, and handicrafts could earn directly from visitors without relying on middlemen. They could price their products themselves, run their own enterprises, and continue living and working within their villages instead of migrating elsewhere in search of employment.

“Tourists are not only visitors; they become consumers who understand the work, effort, and knowledge behind these products through direct experience,” says Preethi.

That experience also creates a deeper understanding of the communities whose livelihoods depend on the palmyra and of the ecosystem that supports them.

Unlike conventional tourism experiences, palmyra communities carry generations of ecological knowledge that exists nowhere else.

They know the birds and insects that inhabit the trees, understand seasonal cycles, and recognise changes in flowering and fruiting patterns that come only from living alongside the landscape for decades.

“They can narrate these experiences as stories, making the journey more memorable while sharing traditional ecological knowledge associated with the tree,” says Preethi.

In her vision, tourism becomes a platform not only for conservation but also for collaboration.

Palmyra artisans in Tamil Nadu could exchange ideas with palm-based craft communities elsewhere in the world through co-learning platforms, helping revive traditional practices while encouraging innovation in products and design.

She also imagines dedicated celebrations that place the tree at the centre of public attention.

“Why not have an exclusive Palmyra Day celebrated globally?” she asks. “The tree deserves recognition for everything it supports.”

Greater visibility, she believes, could also encourage more research and development around palmyra products, crafts, and sustainable livelihoods.

The outcome, according to Preethi, is not simply economic development but social development as well — one that supports inclusive growth, circular economies, and sustainable tourism models rooted in local ownership.

Tourism, she argues, can strengthen the relationship between climbers and the trees they depend on by creating value through cultural experiences, palm-based products, and ecotourism.

As communities begin earning more from the living tree, they gain stronger reasons to conserve palmyra landscapes, preserve traditional climbing skills, and protect the biodiversity that exists around them.

A tree that cuts across faith

What also fascinated her was how the palmyra quietly crosses religious boundaries.

Muslim families use palm leaves during wedding decorations.

Christian households use them for decorating homes.

In Hindu traditions, sweets wrapped in palmyra leaves remain part of festivals like Karthigai Deepam.

“It connects people in ways we do not always notice,” she says.

The challenge no one talks about

For all its benefits, the future of palmyra remains uncertain.

The biggest concern is not the tree itself.

It is the people.

“Most climbers today are around 70 years old,” says Preethi.

The younger generation increasingly avoids climbing work due to safety concerns, low earnings, and changing aspirations.

As climbers disappear, traditional knowledge risks disappearing with them.

“You cannot separate conservation from communities,” she says. “If we want the tree to survive, the people connected to it also need support.”

Her answer lies in tourism.

Not mass tourism, but experiences rooted in local knowledge — trails, festivals, food experiences, and community-led storytelling that create livelihoods while reviving interest in traditional systems.

Because for Preethi, saving the palmyra is not only about protecting a tree.

It is about protecting everything that climbs with it — livelihoods, culture, memory, and communities that have spent generations looking up at these tall silhouettes and seeing not just trees, but survival.

Old broomsticks may seem ready for the bin, but Dr Meena Singh has found a simple way to give them a second life in the garden. The gardening enthusiast, who runs the Instagram channel gardening_ka_keeda, regularly shares practical tips and tricks for growing plants, and this DIY support is one of her useful ideas.

Instead of throwing away used broomsticks, she suggests taking them apart and turning the bamboo sticks into a support for climbing plants.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dr meena singh (@gardening_ka_keeda)

An easy support

To make the support, start by removing the lower covering from an old broom. This leaves around four to five bamboo sticks that can be used for the project. If you have two discarded brooms, you will have enough sticks to make a larger support.

Singh arranges the bamboo sticks into square shapes, placing them one above another to create a frame. She then ties the sticks together at the points where they meet using wire.

There is no need to follow one particular design. Rope can also be used instead of wire, and the sticks can be arranged into different shapes depending on the space available and the type of climber being grown.

Once the frame is secured, it can be placed in a pot or garden bed to give climbing plants something to hold on to as they grow.

In her demonstration, she uses the support for a cypress vine. After around 45 days, the plant has grown well around the structure, with the bamboo frame helping it climb instead of spreading across the ground.

Singh says the idea originally came from her mother, Usha Singhal, whom she had seen using a similar trick. She later recreated the idea in her own way.

What would otherwise have gone into the rubbish can therefore become a useful piece of garden support, proving that a little creativity can turn everyday waste into something practical for your plants.

On 26 August 2026, five-year-old Ishara Tamang watched the flood take her mother.

"My mother was swept away. I jumped and moved forward, then got trapped in the net," she told rescuers afterward, from a hospital bed in Kathmandu, in reporting on flood survivors' accounts. She had been near her home in Khalte village, Rasuwa district, when the water came. She jumped, got tangled in a rescue net, and was pulled out alive, injured and alone. When she woke in hospital, she could tell staff one thing that mattered: her father was in Kathmandu. Her mother is still missing.

A little further down the same valley, Nepali Army soldiers waded into the water near Betrawati to pull out a pair of infant twins stranded by the rising river. What happened next was filmed and shared widely: women soldiers wrapping the babies in blankets, cradling them, rocking them amid the disaster (watch here).

In another clip that travelled just as fast, a Nepal Army officer holds a child too frightened to say who she is. "Don't worry," she tells her. "Your mother will come." (watch here) Nobody around her knew, in that moment, if that was true.

A five-year-old does not need to understand a glacier to know her mother is gone. A soldier does not need a science degree to know a frightened child needs to be held. But the rest of the story is what put that child in the water, and it starts high in the mountains, long before the flood ever reached her village.

This is part of "Climate Change, Explained Like You're 10", The Better India's series that connects the things you see around you to a warming planet, in language simple enough to explain to your children. Sometimes climate change costs a family its mother. This is what that costs, and why, explained as simply as we can.

What actually happened

A huge section of glacier and rock collapsed near the Nepal-Tibet border, sending a wall of water, ice, rock and mud into communities along the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli rivers. Rivers rose by several metres within minutes; roads, bridges and homes disappeared.

At first, some reports suspected an earthquake. Satellite images told a different story: a large section of glacier near the Langtang region had broken away, sending ice and rock crashing into the Lhende Khola river, and the debris flow became a flash flood moving at over 160 km/h in places.

The human cost of climate change

Nepal's flood produced a great many numbers. By the United Nations' last count, more than 900 people had been confirmed dead and over 4,200 remained missing, making this Nepal's deadliest disaster since the 2015 earthquake.

But climate change, at ground level, does not arrive as a number. It arrives as a mother swept off her feet in front of her daughter. The UN's own tally makes this plain: more than 22,000 children were assessed as needing protection services in the days after the flood, meaning a child who had lost the adult meant to be looking after them, even for a while. Around 107, like Ishara, were separated from parents or caregivers outright. Nineteen schools were damaged, nine destroyed entirely.

This is what climate change looks like once you stop describing it as weather and start describing it as a childhood interrupted.

The response fell largely on people in uniform: roughly 19,000 security personnel and 16 helicopters were deployed, and at one hydropower site alone, soldiers pulled 254 trapped workers to safety. But the most important work could not be counted in numbers rescued. It was sitting with a child who did not know where her mother was, and staying there until someone else could take over. Women soldiers of the Nepali Army did this again and again: with the infant twins near Betrawati, with the girl told her mother would come, with dozens of others whose names never made any report. None could promise a child her mother was alive. What they could do, and did, was make sure no child sat alone in the wreckage of her own home.

Why the mountain gave way

A glacier is not a frozen rock. It is a huge mass of ice that slowly moves downhill, and when the mountain beneath it grows warmer and less stable, a section of ice and rock can break away, exactly as it did above Ishara's village.

Climate change did not simply switch on a tap and create this one flood; scientists are still studying the precise chain of events. But Reuters quoted scientists saying unusually warm conditions and rapid snowmelt likely weakened the glacier before it collapsed. Climate change may not have delivered the single push. But it is changing the mountain itself, which means this will not be the last time.

Think of an ice cube left out on the counter: it melts, weakens, changes shape. A glacier works the same way, just on a far larger scale. As temperatures rise, glaciers lose ice, and permafrost, the frozen "glue" that holds mountain slopes together, can thaw too. A 2026 ICIMOD assessment found glacier ice loss across the Hindu Kush Himalayas has doubled since 2000, with up to 27 metres of ice thickness lost since 1975.

That does not end with the ice. Retreating glaciers can leave behind lakes held back only by loose rock, not concrete; if that wall breaks, a glacial lake outburst flood can send water downhill in minutes. And for a while, melting glaciers mean more water in rivers, before it means less, once the ice reserve runs out — too much water, then, later, not enough, in a region whose rivers more than 750 million people depend on, across Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and beyond. Water does not stop at a border. Neither, it turns out, does grief.

The kitchen table conversation

Child: "Why did Nepal suddenly flood?" Parent: "A piece of glacier and rock collapsed in the mountains and sent a huge amount of water, ice and mud into a river."

Child: "I saw soldiers holding crying children. Where were their parents?" Parent: "Some were still missing. Floods like this happen so fast that families get separated in minutes."

Child: "Did climate change cause it?" Parent: "We can't say it alone caused this one collapse. But the Himalayas are warming and glaciers are shrinking, and that makes disasters like this more likely, and more frequent."

We now know we can see it coming

Here is the part of this story that should give us hope rather than dread. Scientists later found that the glacier had been giving warnings. Satellite radar analysed by geophysicist Manoochehr Shirzaei showed the glacier-rock mass creeping downhill for months, then accelerating sharply in the days before it fell. A separate hazard assessment found the glacier's meltwater had turned visibly brown on 24 August, and a crack had opened into the bedrock beneath it, all before the avalanche. With the right systems, researchers estimated people downstream could have had at least ten minutes' warning, in a flood moving at 160 km/h. The mountain was not silent. Nobody was listening yet.

"We can't say, oh my God, nobody knew," said glaciologist Jakob Steiner, pointing to what's still missing: a satellite system that watches continuously for accelerating glacier movement and feeds it straight into flood warnings. "This is where I think we need to invest more," he said.

It already works. During the floods, a warning reached a school in Nepal minutes before it arrived, and a fast-acting principal evacuated over 900 students and staff to safety. Imagine that instinct built into a system for the whole mountain range, whose glaciers and snow support nearly two billion people downstream. Protecting the mountains means protecting the people who live far below them, and the children who might otherwise be pulled from a river by a stranger who doesn't yet know their name.

The warning is already here

The glaciers are getting thinner. Mountain slopes are growing more fragile, and now, for the first time, we can watch some of them tell us so, days before they fail.

The Nepal floods are not proof every future flood will be caused by melting glaciers. They are more useful than that: a warning, and a lesson in what listening looks like — a satellite that catches a crack widening, a principal who doesn't wait to double-check, a soldier who picks up a child she has never met and simply holds her until someone can tell her what happened to her mother.

Somewhere in Kathmandu, Ishara Tamang is still waiting for news of hers. That, more than any temperature chart, is the real cost of a warming Himalaya.

What we can do — Real solutions we have covered at The Better India

We cannot stop a glacier from melting overnight. But we can understand the warning signs and give people time to move.

This IIT Mandi Device Gives a 3-Hour Warning Before Landslides, Making India's Mountains Safer

How to Build a Rainwater Harvesting System: Retd Colonel Shares Low-Cost Method

Nagaland Women Band To Revive 99 Springs, Benefit 12000 Water-Starved Households

What actually makes a city safe for a woman to walk through? For decades, the closest thing India had to an answer was crime data — cold, incomplete, and reliant on women coming forward in the first place. 

Last year, the government tried something it hadn't done at a national scale before: measuring the thing crime data can't capture — how safe women feel, block by block, hour by hour. 

The National Commission for Women's NARI 2025 index, released in August 2025 and described by its developers as India's first national index of its kind, surveyed 12,770 women across 31 cities on their everyday experience of safety — in their neighbourhoods, on buses, at work, after dark.

The findings have taken on fresh relevance in recent weeks, after a minor was allegedly assaulted aboard a moving bus in the Delhi-NCR region — a case that has reignited a familiar, urgent question: what does it actually take to make a city safe for women? 

The good news buried inside the NARI data is that some Indian cities already have a working answer. Here's what they're getting right — and what the rest of the country can borrow from them.

1. Kohima shows that community trust can outperform infrastructure

Kohima, a hill town in Nagaland that most of India would struggle to place on a map, topped the NARI index with a safety score of 82.9 percent — the highest in the country, well above the national average of 65 percent. 

Researchers credit the win less to hardware and more to something harder to install: active neighbourhood watch groups, community policing, and gender-balanced social practices where safety is treated as everyone's job, not just the police's. 

It's a reminder that the most effective safety infrastructure is sometimes social, not physical.

2. Aizawl runs on familiarity, not just force

Aizawl, ranked fourth on the index, follows a similar script to Kohima: strong community networks and a visible, familiar police presence that women say they genuinely trust, even after dark. 

High social trust — the sense that neighbours, shopkeepers, and local police will actually step in — does more for a woman's sense of safety than a patrol car passing by once an hour.

3. The Northeast is running a masterclass

Four of India's seven safest cities — Kohima, Aizawl, Gangtok, and Itanagar — are in the Northeast, a region that rarely gets credit in conversations about urban India. 

Gangtok, ranked fifth with a score of 70.4 percent, stands out for gender-sensitive governance and civic institutions that actually respond when women raise concerns. 

Itanagar's strength is inclusive local governance — women's collectives and awareness campaigns that are built into how the city runs, not bolted on after a crisis. Together, they suggest a pattern worth studying: cities where women have a real stake in local governance tend to also be the cities where women feel safest in it.

4. Visakhapatnam and Bhubaneswar prove infrastructure and institutions can work together

Rounding out the top three, Visakhapatnam and Bhubaneswar are flagged for strong infrastructure paired with active, responsive policing and thoughtful urban planning. 

Neither city relies on one fix alone — well-lit streets and functioning public spaces are paired with institutions that follow through when women report a problem. It's the combination, more than either piece alone, that seems to move the needle.

5. Mumbai proves scale and safety aren't automatically at odds

Mumbai, ranking top seven in the survey, is the only major metropolis to make the safest seven, and researchers point to proactive policing, safer late-night public transport, and workplace safety policies as the reasons why. 

For a city of Mumbai's density and pace, that's a meaningful data point: size doesn't have to be a safety liability if the systemic pieces — transport, policing, workplace protections — are in place together.

6. Representation is doing quiet, heavy lifting

Across nearly every city on the safe list, one pattern recurs: women aren't just being protected by the system, they're staffing it. In several Union Territories, women now make up a third of the police force. 

Cities that have invested in women bus drivers, women-staffed police stations, and women in local governance consistently report higher trust scores from the women who live there — because representation, it turns out, reads as safety.

7. Feeling safe and being statistically safe aren't the same thing

Here's a finding worth sitting with: NCRB's official crime data ranks Kolkata as one of India's lowest-crime major cities on paper, yet it doesn't make NARI's list of safest cities by women's own lived experience. 

That gap is exactly why perception surveys like NARI exist — a low crime count doesn't always mean women actually feel free to walk home at night, take the last bus, or file a complaint when something happens. The most useful safety data captures both: what's reported, and what's felt.

8. What the rest of India can borrow

None of this is a finished playbook — even the safest cities on this list have real gaps to close. But taken together, the NARI data does offer something rare: a replicable pattern. Community policing that treats residents as partners, not just the police. Visible representation, from bus drivers to beat officers. Civic institutions that respond when women raise concerns, instead of after the fact. 

None of it requires a mega-budget or years of infrastructure build-out — it requires treating women's safety as something a city builds daily, not something it announces after a crisis. The cities getting it right today are proof that it's possible. The work now is making sure more of India learns from them.

Sources: 

'40% Women Feel 'Unsafe', Only 1 In 3 Report Harassment: NARI 2025 Report': by Apexa Rai for Business Standard, Published on August 29, 2025

'Here Are the Least Safe Cities for Women in India, as Per a New Survey': by Sneha Richhariya for The Tribune, Published on August 28, 2025

'National Annual Report & Index On Women's Safety: Visakhapatnam, Kohima & Mumbai Safest For Women': by The Hans India Staff for The Hans India, Published on August 29, 2025

In an Indian village, a change in the behaviour of ants can mean more than it appears to.

Before heavy rain, people have long watched ants carry eggs and larvae towards higher, drier ground. Frogs become louder. Birds alter their movement. Snakes sometimes leave their hiding places. 

Such observations have travelled through generations as folklore.

But there is a scientific question underneath them: are animals actually sensing changes before humans can?

The answer is more interesting than the idea of a “sixth sense”.

Animals do not predict earthquakes, cyclones or floods in the human sense. Instead, their bodies can detect physical signals that people cannot easily hear, feel or see, from vibrations travelling through the ground to changes in atmospheric pressure.

And that could explain why animals sometimes appear to move before disaster arrives.

When the ants move

Across many parts of India, ants are among the animals people closely observe before heavy rain. Their movement has been incorporated into traditional environmental knowledge in several communities.

The ants themselves do not know that a storm is coming.

Their colonies, however, are buried in the environment.

Changes in soil moisture, humidity, temperature and water levels can alter conditions inside and around a nest. Moving eggs or larvae to safer ground may therefore be a response to environmental change rather than an act of prediction.

The earthquake question

The idea becomes more striking when the disaster is an earthquake.

For centuries, people have reported dogs barking, snakes emerging, birds taking flight and livestock becoming restless before earthquakes. India has its own body of stories around unusual animal behaviour, particularly across the seismically active Himalayas and Northeast.

There is a possible biological explanation.

An earthquake does not send just one kind of wave through the Earth. P-waves, or primary waves, travel faster than the more destructive S-waves that follow. Animals capable of detecting subtle ground vibrations may register these early movements before humans consciously feel the main shaking.

Elephants are particularly interesting because they can detect low-frequency vibrations through their feet and communicate using very low-frequency sounds. Snakes are also highly sensitive to vibrations travelling through the ground.

But this does not mean a snake can tell us an earthquake is coming tomorrow.

The US Geological Survey notes that unusual animal behaviour has been reported before earthquakes for centuries, but scientists have not established a consistent pattern that can reliably predict when an earthquake will occur.

An animal may detect a disturbance. It cannot necessarily tell us what caused it.

The 2004 tsunami

That distinction became important after one of the deadliest natural disasters of modern times.

On 26 December 2004, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake struck beneath the Indian Ocean off Indonesia, generating a tsunami that killed at least 225,000 people across countries around the Indian Ocean, according to the BBC.

Many coastal communities received no warning.

In the minutes and hours before waves reached shore, however, eyewitness accounts described animals behaving differently. The BBC reported accounts of elephants moving towards higher ground, flamingos abandoning low-lying nesting areas and dogs refusing to go outdoors. In Thailand's Bang Koey village, residents reportedly saw buffaloes suddenly turn towards the sea before running uphill shortly before the tsunami struck.

The stories became part of the mythology surrounding the disaster.

But scientists have repeatedly cautioned that such accounts cannot establish that animals predicted the tsunami.

What they do demonstrate is the possibility that animals responded to environmental signals associated with the earthquake, waves or changing conditions around them.

A weather radar of their own

The same principle applies to storms.

Many birds can detect changes in atmospheric pressure, while some animals hear frequencies far below the range of human hearing. These abilities can become useful when weather conditions begin changing.

Research has found that some birds respond to falling barometric pressure associated with approaching storms. Migratory birds can also respond to atmospheric conditions while navigating over long distances.

A falling pressure system that means “bad weather approaching” to a meteorologist may simply mean “conditions are changing” to a bird.

Folklore isn't necessarily the opposite of science

This is where India's traditional knowledge becomes worth examining carefully.

Some observations may have been shaped by folklore over generations.

Science does not have to accept every traditional interpretation to take the observation ser

The useful question is whether the behaviour can be measured, repeated and linked to a specific environmental change.

Could ants reliably indicate rising soil moisture before floods? Can birds' movements reveal approaching atmospheric disturbances? Can animal responses to ground vibrations improve our understanding of earthquakes?

These are testable questions. Not prophets. Sensors.

An animal body is equipped with sensory systems shaped by millions of years of evolution. Vibrations, pressure, sound, humidity and other changes that barely register with humans can become information for another species.

But animal behaviour is not precise enough to replace scientific warning systems. A dog refusing to go outside could mean many things. Birds may move because of predators. Ants may relocate because their nest has become wet.

That uncertainty is exactly why researchers need controlled studies rather than anecdotes.

Still, the old observations raise a question modern technology has not made irrelevant.

Sources:

‘The animals that detect disasters’: By Norman Miller, Published on 15 February 2022

‘Evidence vs Myth: Understanding Displacement in a Changing Climate’: By Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, Published on 8 December 2020

‘Can animals help us predict earthquakes?’: By Jocarlowe, Published in 20 April 2016

A glass of water can look clear and still contain contaminants that cannot be seen, tasted, or smelled. In several parts of India, groundwater contains naturally occurring arsenic and fluoride, pollutants that can pose serious health risks when people are exposed to them over long periods.

The challenge becomes even bigger when both are present in the same water. Removing one contaminant does not necessarily mean removing the other, making treatment more complicated and often more expensive.

Now, researchers at IIT Guwahati have found a way to tackle both at the same time.

The team has developed a rotating-anode electrocoagulation (RA-EC) reactor that can remove up to 98.2% of arsenate and 91.8% of fluoride within minutes. Even more importantly, the initial demonstration puts the estimated operating cost at just Rs 18 to Rs 58 for every 1,000 litres of treated water, depending on the concentration of contaminants.

A small change that makes a big difference

So, how does it work?

The idea builds on a familiar water-treatment process called electrocoagulation, where electricity and metal electrodes are used to help pull pollutants out of water.

But the IIT Guwahati team made one important change. Instead of keeping the aluminium electrode stationary, they made it rotate.

That movement may sound simple, but it changes what happens inside the reactor. As the aluminium anode rotates, it improves the mixing of water, helps pollutants come into better contact with the treatment process and continuously renews the electrode surface.

The process also encourages the formation of aluminium hydroxide flocs — tiny particles that act like pollutant catchers.

When electricity passes through the reactor, aluminium ions and hydroxide ions combine to form these microscopic flocs. Arsenic and fluoride attach to them and can then be removed from the water through adsorption, coagulation and precipitation.

The rotating electrode also addresses another problem that can affect conventional electrocoagulation: electrode passivation. In simple terms, material can build up on a stationary electrode over time, reducing its effectiveness. The rotating design helps keep the electrode surface active.

Why removing both matters

Groundwater serves as the primary source of drinking water for millions of people across India. In several regions, however, it contains both arsenic and fluoride, two contaminants that pose significant long-term health risks.

"Treating them together has remained particularly challenging because they behave differently during conventional purification processes and compete for removal sites,” says Prof Mihir Kumar Purkait, Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Guwahati.

The researchers wanted to know whether their reactor would continue to work when faced with the kind of complex chemistry found in actual groundwater — rather than only controlled laboratory water.

So, they tested how factors including rotational speed, current density, electrode spacing and treatment time affected its performance. They also tested the system with naturally occurring ions such as calcium, magnesium, bicarbonate, sulphate and phosphate, as well as real groundwater samples collected from Assam.

“Our technology was also tested under realistic groundwater chemistry, including the presence of naturally occurring ions such as calcium, magnesium, bicarbonate, sulphate, and phosphate, as well as real groundwater samples collected from Assam,” says Mr Mukesh Bharti, Research Scholar, Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Guwahati.

Taking the technology beyond the lab

The potential applications go beyond a single treatment system. The researchers say the technology could be adapted for community drinking-water purification, decentralised rural water-treatment systems and groundwater affected by arsenic and fluoride.

It could also be explored for industrial wastewater treatment or combined with technologies such as adsorption and membrane filtration.

The findings have been published in the peer-reviewed Chemical Engineering Journal.

But the researchers are already looking ahead. The next phase will focus on developing a pilot-scale, continuous-flow version of the reactor — a step towards seeing how the system could work outside the laboratory and at a larger scale.

The team also plans to introduce sensors and automated controls that can monitor parameters such as pH, conductivity, electrical current and rotational speed in real time.

For communities where clean groundwater remains difficult to access, innovations like this could eventually make treatment not just more effective, but more affordable too. And sometimes, it is a relatively simple rethink, like making an electrode rotate, that can move a promising idea one step closer to becoming a real-world solution.

When devastating floods swept through Nepal’s Himalayan region, Captain Priya Adhikari kept flying into some of the most dangerous areas to help rescue people stranded by the disaster. 🚁❤️ She described the operation as one of the most challenging she has experienced, even more difficult to navigate than the 2015 Nepal earthquake because so much of the destruction was concentrated in a narrow valley.

The rescue missions meant repeated flights through difficult terrain, even as exhaustion began to take its toll. “Most of us are so exhausted because of all the flights we've been doing. We've been trained for this,” she said. But despite the danger and fatigue, Priya continued flying, helping bring hope to communities cut off by the floods.

Her courage is a reminder that heroes aren’t always found on the ground. Sometimes, they’re in the skies, flying toward danger when everyone else is trying to escape it. For her courage, dedication and sacrifice, we salute Captain Priya Adhikari. ❤️

#PriyaAdhikari #NepalFloods #NepalFlood #RescueOperation #HimalayanRescue #RescuePilot #WomenInAviation #WomenWhoInspire #WomenHeroes #Nepal #Himalayas #FloodRescue #Bravery #RealHeroes #TheBetterIndia

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Who Is Captain Priya Adhikari? Nepal’s Rescue Hero
How Captain Priya Adhikari Is Rescuing People During Nepal Floods
Nepal Flood Rescue: Meet the Woman Flying Into Danger
Captain Priya Adhikari’s Himalayan Rescue Mission
The Female Pilot Leading Nepal’s Daring Flood Rescues

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Somewhere on the Jogeshwari-Vikhroli Link Road, under a sheet of monsoon water that looked no different from any other flooded stretch of Mumbai, a pothole was waiting. It had no warning sign, no barricade, nothing to mark it as anything other than more grey road.

A motorbike carrying two brothers home rode straight into it — and in the seconds after, one father's entire life split into a before and an after.

Nine years later, that same man walks the city's streets at dawn with a shovel over his shoulder, broken paver blocks in a sack, and a name Mumbai has given him that he never asked for: Pothole Dada.

A phone call that changed everything

Dadarao Bilhore was standing in his grocery store in Andheri, getting ready to break his Ekadashi fast, when his phone rang. His sons, Ram and Prakash, had fallen off their bike near Seepz.

Nothing serious, he was told — they'd sought shelter from the rain, then ridden on once the water eased, only for their bike to vanish into a pothole hidden beneath the flooded road.

He left for the hospital alone, still believing it was a scare rather than a tragedy. Halfway there, a second call arrived. Ram was alive, shaken and bleeding but saved by his helmet.

16-year-old Prakash, riding pillion without one, had been flung further and had landed with an impact his body could not survive. He had suffered a brain haemorrhage. He was gone.

Dadarao didn't tell the rest of the family. Not that day. He waited almost 24 hours, until Ram had stabilised, before anyone else learned that Prakash was never coming home.

When his wife finally did, she remembers seizing her husband by the shirt and saying, “You promised to bring my son back the way he left this morning, she told him. Give me my son back.” There was no version of that promise he could keep.

Grief that picked up a shovel

A month later, while the wound was still raw enough that most people would have folded inward, Dadarao did something almost nobody around him expected.

He walked out with a shovel, a sack of broken paver blocks, gravel and stones, found the nearest pothole, and began to fill it with his own hands.

It wasn't only his son he was thinking of. He had heard of a mother killed instantly in an accident near Ambernath. A wife thrown from her vehicle and killed in Bandra. Different roads, different families, the same cause.

And every time, the pattern afterwards was identical — officials arriving only once a body already had.

"I observed how authorities waited until someone died to fill potholes and file FIRs," he says. "I couldn't let any more people die like Prakash."

So he stopped waiting for them. Since that first pothole in 2015, he has filled more than 1,450 — most of them along the edges of roads, four to five feet wide, exactly the kind a rider doesn't see until the front wheel is already gone.

He describes the work almost as a conversation with his son. "When someone asks me why I fill potholes, I tell them, I have lost my kid, I don't want you to lose yours," he says. "Whenever I fill one pothole, I feel I have saved someone. My son didn't return, but somebody else's son will go home safe. So what if my clothes get stained, or my arms get muddy? It doesn't matter."

One shovel becomes a citywide fix

Word of a grieving father filling potholes with his bare hands doesn't stay quiet for long in a city like Mumbai.

His example helped give rise to the Fill in the Potholes Project, a citizen collective, and the Spothole app that came out of it — built on nothing more complicated than a phone's camera and GPS, letting any resident report a pothole's exact location the moment they spot it, instead of watching it fester for weeks.

That gap between spotting a problem and fixing it is what Dadarao has always aimed his shovel at. By his estimate, even a properly reported pothole can take two to three weeks to be filled through official channels — a window wide enough for someone else's Prakash to fall through.

His own method was never meant to replace the system. It was meant to hold the road together until the system caught up.

The idea has since travelled well beyond his own neighbourhood. In Hyderabad, a retired railway employee named Bala Gangadhar Tilak picked up the same cause independently and has since filled 1,500 potholes of his own, earning the title 'Pride of Telangana'.

The fight hasn’t ended yet

Filling potholes has never been Dadarao's only answer to what happened on that stretch of road.

He has also pursued an FIR against the civic officials and contractor responsible for maintaining it — a case that remains in front of the Borivali District Court, built on the fact that the pothole had opened up during unmarked construction work, with no barricade or warning sign to protect anyone riding over it.

His loss has also become a plea he repeats to every rider who'll listen: wear a helmet, and make sure whoever rides behind you wears one too. Not putting one on Prakash that day, he says, is the one thing he cannot forgive himself for.

Every year around Prakash's death anniversary, Dadarao performs a small ritual for his son, then picks up his shovel again — often joined by fellow volunteers — and fills potholes near Seepz, at the very spot the road took his son from him.

Nine years on, what began as one man's private way of refusing to let go has become one of Mumbai's most recognisable acts of civic grief, ten muddy minutes at a time, so that somebody else's son gets to go home.

About the campaign

This story is part of The Better India's #CivicSenseHeroes, a year-long nationwide campaign celebrating citizens who take responsibility for the places and communities we all share. From cleaner streets and safer roads to restored lakes and public spaces, we're looking for everyday Indians turning civic sense into action. Know someone doing work like this? Nominate your Civic Sense Hero here.

There is a reason no two Indian households argue about the same samosa. 

The pastry began its journey thousands of kilometres away, carried by Arab traders and Moroccan merchants who packed mince-filled triangles into their saddlebags long before the recipe ever reached an Indian kitchen, eventually arriving at the Delhi Sultanate's royal tables. 

Once it settled into the subcontinent, nearly every region rebuilt it from scratch, keeping only the idea of a fried, stuffed pastry and discarding everything else. 

On 5 September, World Samosa Day marks that restlessness with its own occasion, which makes it the perfect excuse to travel through six states and meet six genuinely different samosas.

1. Punjab and Delhi: The one everyone pictures first

This is the samosa most non-Indians would draw from memory: large, thick-crusted and dominated by potatoes and green peas, with raisins and cashews folded in to soften the heat of the chillies. 

It is a snack built for cold weather and long conversations, sold hot outside cinema halls, in office canteens, and at the capital's older chai-and-samosa corners, where a plate typically arrives with tamarind chutney on one side and a sharper green one on the other.

Alongside the classic potato version, Delhi keeps a keema or moong dal variant in rotation for anyone who wants something heavier than a teatime snack.

2. West Bengal: Smaller and flakier

Bengal takes the same starting point and shrinks it, then sharpens it.

The singara's covering is noticeably thinner and flakier than a standard samosa's, and its filling leans on peanuts and a whisper of sweetness rather than the tang that defines the Punjabi version, with the potato itself cut fine and cooked rather than boiled and mashed. 

In Kolkata, the singara grows larger again during the monsoon, when street vendors switch fillings entirely to mutton, chicken or moong dal, best eaten scalding hot with tea while rain hammers the pavement outside.

3. Karnataka: Onion takes over completely

Here, potato barely gets a mention. Onion samosas are the default order, thin-skinned and sharply spiced, sold from glass cases in bakeries that have built entire reputations on them.

A keema version, popularised by the same local bakeries, runs a close second. 

It is a useful reminder that the samosa's supposedly signature filling was never fixed to begin with, only assumed to be universal by people who had not travelled south of Hyderabad.

4. Telangana: No potato, no triangle

Hyderabad's lukhmi abandons the format almost entirely.

The dough is kneaded with yoghurt rather than plain water, then cut into flat squares instead of folded into triangles, and the filling is strictly spiced mutton mince, never potato, never a vegetarian substitute. 

It remains a fixture at Hyderabadi weddings and family celebrations, served as a starter before the biryani rather than as a between-meals snack, which places it closer to a formal course than a street food.

5. Gujarat: Potato gives way to cabbage

Gujarat treats the samosa as a canvas for vegetables rather than starch.

The patti samosa drops the usual potato filling for finely shredded cabbage, seasoned lightly enough to let the vegetable's own sweetness come through, and wrapped in a covering that fries up noticeably lighter and crunchier than its northern counterparts.

6. Maharashtra: The samosa becomes a sandwich

Mumbai does not just change what goes inside the samosa; it changes where the samosa goes next.

The city's samosa pav takes a whole fried samosa, breaks it slightly, and tucks it into a soft pav spread with green and tamarind chutney, turning a single snack into a handheld meal sold beside the city's more famous vada pav at railway stalls across the city.

Line up all six and a pattern appears. 

The samosa never travelled as a fixed recipe, only as an idea flexible enough to carry whatever a region already loved eating, which is exactly how a Central Asian import ended up looking utterly indigenous in six unrelated ways. 

World Samosa Day may have started as a simple excuse to eat the snack, but in India, it has always really been an excuse to eat six entirely different ones.

Sources

'Singara Recipe | Bengali Shingara': by Dassana Amit for Dassana's Veg Recipes, Published on 3 July, 2025

'Samosa Pav': by Dassana Amit for Dassana's Veg Recipes, Published on 19 July, 2026

'World Samosa Day': by National Day Calendar Staff for National Day Calendar, Published on 2 September, 2024

They left Finland and moved to India with their children without ever visiting India before. 🇫🇮🇮🇳

The beginning wasn't easy. There was temporary housing, unfamiliar systems and endless paperwork. But slowly, Mumbai started feeling like home.Their children made new friends, discovered Indian food, rode auto-rickshaws and embraced a completely different way of life. They still miss Finland’s quiet lifestyle, fresh air and family back home. But there’s one thing they didn’t expect: their children aren't asking when they’re going back.

They came to India because they wanted to give their children a wider world and a new perspective on life.They never imagined that along the way, India would become a part of their own story too.From Finland to Mumbai, this is what it’s like for a Finnish family to move to India, raise children in Mumbai and build a new life far from home.

Would you move to another country to give your children a completely different childhood? ❤️

#FinlandToIndia #FinnishFamily #MovingToIndia #MovingToMumbai #LifeInIndia #MumbaiLife #RaisingKidsInIndia #ExpatLife #LivingInMumbai #ForeignersInIndia #IndiaStory #MumbaiStories #LifeInMumbai #ParentingInIndia #TheBetterIndia

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Why This Finnish Family Moved From Finland to Mumbai
What It’s Like Raising Kids in Mumbai as a Finnish Family
Finnish Family’s Journey From Finland to India
Moving From Finland to India: Their Life in Mumbai
Why They Chose India to Raise Their Children

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A classroom can be an ordinary place.

Rows of benches, hurried handwriting, a blackboard covered in half-erased equations, and a teacher trying to make 40 students understand the same thing in 40 different ways.

But sometimes, a teacher says something that stays.

It could be someone who notices a quiet child has something important to say, tells a struggling student not to chase marks, or simply believes in a young person before they believe in themselves.

This Teacher’s Day, we asked our changemakers about the teachers who changed their lives. 

For Manav Sony, who left a stable legal career to become an NGO founder, the lesson came from a teacher he never met in a classroom. 

For Vaibhav Rathore, founder of Revamp India, it came from teachers who made him love learning and pushed him onto a stage when he was terrified. 

And for Richa Jain, who began teaching on YouTube with just her smartphone and now reaches around 90,000 NET and JRF aspirants through free Hindi coaching, it came from her Hindi teacher, who taught her to believe in herself.

Today, all three are creating change in ways they may not have imagined as students. But their journeys carry the lessons of the teachers who shaped them.

‘Life is never easy. It’s how easy you make it’

Before becoming an NGO founder who has impacted more than 3.8 lakh people across 35 cities, Manav Sony had a very different dream.

A law graduate from Kolkata, he wanted to become a Supreme Court advocate and perhaps a judge. His plan was to intern at a chamber in Kolkata, move to Delhi and build his legal career.

Then, in 2018, a conversation changed his direction.

The person was Jimmy Tangree, a radio jockey whose show Manav regularly listened to. Tangri told him, “Life is never easy. It’s how easy you actually make it. You have to follow your passion, do what you love, and love what you do.”

Manav considers Tangree a “teacher of life” who saw something others had missed.

“He saw that passion in me, that I want to do something for society,” Manav recalls. “He had that trust in me that even if I don’t do a corporate job, if I am into social work, I can become a very big person in life.”

In January 2020, Manav met Tangree and spoke about his growing desire to work for people who needed help.

“Don’t go for big things in life. Go for things which actually will give you a lot of blessings because blessings should be more important than money sometimes in your life,” Tangree told him.

Another moment gave Manav the confidence to act on that advice. While he was working with an NGO, Tangree recommended him to handle a CSR client.

Manav was nervous about handling such a big company. The night before the meeting, Tangree called him at around 11 pm and helped him prepare — what to pitch, how to speak and how to show that he could handle the responsibility.

The meeting went well. Soon, Manav was working on tree plantations and community initiatives.

“For him, it was a small gesture. But for me, it was something that changed my life,” he says.

Later, when Manav left his high-paying legal job to pursue social impact, he went back to  Tangree.

“I cried that day. I asked him, ‘Sir, what am I doing with my life?’”

Tangree listened, then gave him a piece of paper and asked him to write what he truly wanted.

Manav wrote: I want to follow my dreams. I want to follow my passion, but I don't have someone to encourage me.

Tangree’s answer was simple: “No matter who is there or not, I will stand by you.”

Today, Manav leads the Funsmart Knowledge Solution Foundation, which has planted more than 4,000 trees, collected 12 tonnes of plastic waste and impacted lakhs of people.

But when asked what he thinks Tangree would be proudest of, Manav doesn’t mention the numbers.

“The person I became,” he says.

The bond continues. Manav calls him every Friday to share the week’s good news. When his story appeared in Dainik Bhaskar, Tangree ordered a copy from another city and kept it in his office.

For Manav, that is perhaps the greatest gift a teacher can give — not a lesson to memorise, but the confidence to become the person you were capable of being.

“Learning is bigger than marks”

For Vaibhav Rathore, some of his earliest lessons came from the classroom, but not always from textbooks.

His history teacher, Reshu Tiwari, changed the way he looked at learning.

“I stopped chasing rank and passing from her class,” he says. “It was more like I can understand so many things in the class.”

She taught history through stories, bringing events such as the Battle of Panipat and the Indus Valley Civilisation alive.

His mathematics teacher, Vipul Sir, gave him another important lesson: confidence in public speaking.

In Class 9, Vipul Sir asked Vaibhav to speak a quote at the school assembly. He was terrified. His teacher simply asked, “What is the worst that can happen?”

Vaibhav went on stage to recite Don’t find mistakes, find remedies. Nervous, he said it incorrectly and ended with, “Thank you and have a nice day.”

It wasn’t his finest speech, but it was the beginning. By Class 11, he was sports captain and conducting assemblies himself.

“I said the quote wrong, but my life went in the right direction after that,” he laughs.

Reshu ma’am also taught him to take pride in his work, regardless of recognition.

“Whatever work you are doing, you should do it with full dedication irrespective of result,” Vaibhav says.

Today, that philosophy shapes his work with schoolchildren through Revamp India Foundation. Through initiatives such as Faldaar, students have helped saplings reach a 75 percent survival rate by developing a personal connection with the trees they plant.

His teachers also shaped the way he interacts with children.

He remembers visiting their homes during Holi as a child. Today, when children surround him after workshops for photographs and autographs or message him with questions, he feels the same connection.

“I feel that I have done something right,” he says.

During a seven-day programme across 11 districts on examination stress, one session lasted more than four hours because children kept asking questions. Many still message him.

For Vaibhav, listening to children is part of what makes a good teacher — along with genuinely loving the work and working hard for students.

“The student you taught to believe in herself is now teaching others to do the same”

Richa Jain describes herself as an ordinary student. Academics were never her greatest passion; like many students, she simply wanted to get good marks and move ahead.

That experience, she says, helps her understand her students today.

The teacher who changed how she saw herself was Dr Sakshi Singh, her Hindi teacher.

“She did not merely teach me a subject; she taught me to recognise my potential and trust in my own abilities,” Richa says.

Their relationship went beyond the classroom. Richa could confide in her about personal and family matters, seeing her as both a teacher and an elder sister.

During exam preparation, poor test scores would sometimes leave Richa discouraged. Dr Singh told her not to compare herself with others. Instead, she should focus on what she had learnt that day and whether she was better than she had been the day before.

She also assured Richa that she would eventually clear the exam.

That advice stayed with her. Even today, when she faces failure, she asks herself: Am I a little better today than I was yesterday?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Richa had time to reflect. After qualifying for the NET/JRF exam while pursuing her studies, she realised that her preparation and knowledge could help other students who needed guidance.

She began sharing her learnings online, initially using only her smartphone.

What started as an attempt to make students’ preparation easier grew into a community of around 90,000 NET and JRF aspirants through her free Hindi coaching.

The experience also shaped her idea of what a teacher should be.

“A teacher's role should be to empower the student so that they can eventually make their own decisions,” she says.

For Richa, teaching is not about making students dependent on a teacher, but helping them become self-reliant.

She hopes Dr Singh sees that same lesson in her work.

If her teacher visited her class today, Richa says she would ask for honest feedback.

“I still wish to learn from her,” she says.

And there is one thing she would like to tell her teacher:

“Ma'am, the student whom you taught to believe in herself — today, I am trying to instill that very same belief in my own students.”

The lessons that stay

Perhaps that is what makes teachers more than the people who stand at the front of a classroom.

Their words can become anchors. Their encouragement can give someone the courage to take a risk. Their belief can stay with a student long after the classroom is left behind.

For these changemakers, the teachers who shaped them taught different lessons — but the impact was much the same.

Sometimes, a teacher changes a student’s life without ever knowing how far that one lesson will travel.

Source:

'At 26, He Left a Stable Legal Career. Today, His Work Impacts 3.8 Lakh Lives' by Nishtha kawrani for The Better India, Published on 2 July 2026.

'How Naming Trees After Teachers Helped 10000 Saplings Survive in UP Schools' by Nishtha Kawrani for the Better India, Published on 17 Match 2026.

'A PhD Scholar in UP Turned Her Smartphone Into a Free Hindi Classroom for 90000 NET & JRF Aspirants' by Nishtha Kawrani for The Better India, Published on 8 July 2026.

Flights. Passengers. Takeoffs. That's what we see.

What we don't see? The hands that move cargo at 3 AM. The technicians keeping systems alive. The cooks, firefighters, engineers—hundreds who never board a plane but make every takeoff happen with trust, responsibility and pride.

In fact, economists call airports "multipliers." The reason? Thousands of jobs.

But the real multiplier? People. Dreams. Futures.

In partnership with Adani Airports

This is #UdaanKiShaan -- when progress looks like people, not just steel
#thebetterindia

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A group of international Sanskrit learners was walking through the Elbsandsteingebirge, or the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, in Germany. They navigated uneven paths, took in the landscape and kept an eye on one another as they walked.

Then Sanskrit became part of the conversation.

Something they spotted along the way was described in Sanskrit. The group spoke about the terrain, checked on one another and later discussed tea and food during their picnic.

For the learners, the hike became an opportunity to use Sanskrit as they would any living language — to talk about what they were seeing, doing and experiencing in the moment.

Beyond the textbook

Sanskrit is often encountered through texts, grammar and formal study.

It is an ancient and classical Indo-Aryan language of South Asia. Its earliest form, Vedic Sanskrit, dates to around 1500–1200 BCE and is associated with texts including the Rigveda. Sanskrit also holds an important place in Buddhist and Jain traditions.

Its long literary history is a major part of its significance. But studying old texts is not the only way to engage with a language.

It can also be spoken, practised and used to describe everyday experiences.

The German hike offered learners a chance to do just that.

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Instead of treating vocabulary as something to memorise before it can be used, the surroundings became prompts for conversation.

A steep section of the trail created a reason to talk about difficulty. Food brought words for eating and sharing. The landscape offered vocabulary that might otherwise remain confined to a classroom exercise.

A classroom without walls

The hike was informal. It was not an official class or part of a Summer School activity.

The participants were simply trying to make Sanskrit work in a situation where conversation had to happen in real time.

That meant finding words, putting sentences together and responding to one another as the walk unfolded.

For the learners, the trail became a different kind of language-learning space.

Making old words useful again

The experience also raises a larger question: what does it mean to keep a classical language alive?

Preservation can mean safeguarding manuscripts, teaching grammar and studying historical texts. But using a language adds another dimension. It gives learners a chance to explore how it can describe experiences that were not part of the world in which many of its foundational texts were written.

A mountain hike in modern Germany is not an ancient Sanskrit setting. Neither are a shared cup of tea, a picnic, a conversation about tiredness or an informal exchange between international students.

Yet the learners were using Sanskrit to talk about all of them.

That was the value of taking their language practice outdoors: words were no longer just something to remember for a lesson. They had an immediate purpose.

From hiking to everyday life

The group did more than walk and talk. Some participants also practised yoga while conversing in Sanskrit.

For international learners, experiences like these can create opportunities to practise the language together while sharing an activity.

The Elbsandsteingebirge hike does not replace formal Sanskrit education. Grammar, literature, history and structured learning remain important parts of studying the language.

But it showed the learners something simple: a language needs opportunities to be used.

For Sanskrit, those opportunities do not always have to be found in classrooms, libraries or lecture halls.

They can also be found on a walking trail, around a picnic table or anywhere learners have something to say to one another.

In Shani Shingnapur, a house can stand empty for days without a locked front door. There are no padlocks on many entrances, no metal gates guarding homes, and often little more than a curtain separating a family from the street.

The same belief extends to shops and public spaces. Even the local branch of a nationalised bank once opened with a glass entrance that had no lock.

In a country where even rural homes increasingly rely on security grilles, CCTV cameras and heavy locks, this Maharashtra village has followed the opposite idea for generations: leave the doors open, and trust that no one will steal.

Shani Shingnapur sits in Maharashtra's Ahilyanagar district, formerly Ahmednagar, about 240 km east of Mumbai. Home to around 15,000 people today, the village has become known across India for something remarkably simple — its houses do not traditionally have doors.

For generations, residents have believed that theft invites punishment from Shani, the deity associated with the planet Saturn, who is said to protect the village. The belief is so deeply embedded that locking a home has traditionally been seen as unnecessary.

But this isn't simply a story about a village without locks. It is about what happens when a religious belief becomes a community-wide social rule — and what happens when that rule encounters a changing world.

A 300-year-old promise

The custom traces its roots to a legend that villagers have passed down for nearly three centuries.

Around 300 years ago, when a shepherd living near the Panasnala river reportedly prodded a strange black slab that had washed ashore after a flood, blood is said to have emerged from the stone.

That night, according to local belief, Shani appeared in a villager's dream and revealed that the stone was his own self-manifested form. He asked that it remain in the open, without a roof, and promised to protect the village.

The story eventually became more than a legend about a mysterious stone. It shaped the way people lived.

If Shani was protecting the settlement, residents believed there was little reason to protect their homes from one another.

Over time, the absence of doors became part of everyday life.

How an entire village adopted the custom

For residents, the practice is less about deliberately rejecting modern security and more about growing up with the assumption that it simply isn't necessary.

Homes traditionally have open entrances, sometimes softened with curtains for privacy. Shops follow similar practices. Families can leave their houses unattended without necessarily worrying about locking them first.

Housewife Jayashree Gade, for instance, has spoken about keeping her family's savings in an unlocked tin barrel — a practice that would seem unthinkable in most homes.

The belief is also reinforced socially. Children grow up hearing that stealing from another person will invite Shani's punishment. The idea becomes part of the village's moral code: the consequence of theft isn't simply arrest or social shame, but divine retribution.

That shared belief may be what makes the system work.

A lock is a physical barrier. In Shani Shingnapur, faith has traditionally served as the barrier.

Even the bank followed the rule

Perhaps the clearest example of how deeply the custom has entered village life came when a state-owned bank branch opened here in January 2011.

Its glass front door was deliberately fitted without a conventional lock, with the decision presented as an extension of the village's long-standing faith.

But the arrangement also revealed an interesting compromise between tradition and modern life.

While customers could walk through an unlocked entrance, the bank did not leave its money unprotected. Cash was kept inside a secured strongroom.

The distinction was telling: the village could preserve its symbolic open-door tradition while still using conventional security where financial risk demanded it.

As the village grew and attracted increasing numbers of visitors, that balance became more important.

When the belief met reality

The tradition has not gone entirely untested.

In October 2010, a visitor from northern India reported that cash and valuables worth Rs 35,000 had been stolen from a vehicle. A case involving stolen jewellery followed the next year.

The incidents challenged the image of a settlement where theft simply did not happen.

When the bank opened without a front lock in 2011, district police were also reported to have privately raised concerns about an unsecured cash counter in a village that could see tens of thousands of pilgrims on busy weekends.

The outside world was changing too.

For decades, the nearest police station had been several kilometres away, something locals had cited as further evidence that serious crime was virtually unheard of. But as the population and visitor numbers increased, the village eventually got its own police station.

Even that building reflected the unusual relationship between tradition and modern administration.

Its door was installed without a lock, out of respect for local sentiment.

When tradition comes at a personal cost

Not everyone has found the open-door tradition easy to live with.

For Sukhadev Bajira Shete, the belief became difficult to accept after his mother's wedding necklace was stolen from their home when he was a teenager.

His father, a temple trustee, continued to oppose installing a door while he was alive.

For Shete's wife, that meant living for years without the privacy most people take for granted.

Only after his father's death did Shete install a sliding metal gate with a padlock, becoming one of the few residents to openly break with the village's traditional practice.

His decision highlights a tension that is easy to miss when the custom is viewed only as an intriguing cultural curiosity.

For some residents, an open doorway represents faith and community trust.

For others, a door can represent something equally fundamental: privacy, autonomy and the right to feel secure inside one's own home.

Can a village really be crime-free?

The reputation of Shani Shingnapur has also attracted scepticism.

Critics argue that the village's image may partly survive because smaller incidents are not always reported. Documented cases of theft have also made the idea of a completely crime-free settlement difficult to defend.

There are contradictions too.

While homes traditionally go without locks, the temple's donation box has a lock — an irony that sceptics often point to when questioning how absolute the custom really is.

Yet for many residents, these contradictions have not been enough to abandon the tradition.

Trust here is not necessarily being presented as a replacement for every form of security. Instead, it has become a deeply rooted part of the community's identity.

A village caught between faith and change

The Shani Shingnapur of today is very different from the small settlement of three centuries ago.

Its population has grown to around 15,000. Thousands of visitors arrive regularly, particularly on busy weekends. What was once a relatively isolated village is now connected to a much larger world.

That brings new pressures.

More people means more movement. More visitors mean more strangers. And modern life increasingly comes with expectations of privacy and security that did not exist when the open-door tradition began.

Yet the custom continues.

Residents still leave homes and shops without conventional locks. The police station has an unlocked door. The bank maintains modern security behind its open entrance.

And families continue to make their own choices about where tradition ends and personal security begins.

Will the doors eventually return?

For nearly 300 years, the open doorway in Shani Shingnapur has represented more than the absence of a lock.

It has represented a collective agreement — that neighbours can be trusted, that stealing is unthinkable, and that a divine presence is watching over the community.

But change rarely arrives all at once.

Families like the Shetes have begun quietly putting doors and locks back into their lives. Younger generations are growing up in a village that is increasingly exposed to the realities of the outside world.

The question facing Shani Shingnapur may therefore no longer be whether its ancient belief can survive.

It may be whether the next generation will still believe that being watched is enough.

Sources:

'Theft in Maharashtra's crime free temple village': by IANS for Deccan Herald, Published on 26 October, 2010

'Temple town with doorless homes gets a bank with no lock': by IANS for Deccan Herald, Published on 10 January, 2011

'Maharashtra's Ahmednagar officially renamed to Ahilyanagar': by Mrityunjay Bose for Deccan Herald, Published on 5 October, 2024

This story is part of “Parenting: What Google Won’t Tell You” — The Better India’s people-led parenting series that goes beyond conventional advice to document how real families are actually raising their children. Through real parents, parenting coaches, influencers and experts, the series brings honest, diverse and relatable perspectives on the questions, choices, challenges and solutions that shape everyday parenting — the things Google can’t always answer.

It’s Sunday, and the family is getting ready to head out. Everyone is looking forward to the day, except one person.

“I'm bored. I'm not coming with you guys.”

That was the response Komal Baxi heard from her 12-year-old son when he first started opting out of family outings. Like many mothers, her first reaction was to feel hurt and wonder why her child suddenly didn’t want to spend time with the family.

In a video shared by Komal, an RCI-certified psychologist from Gujarat with over 15 years of experience, she recalls how she initially tried to convince her son that the outings were planned for his enjoyment and that Sundays were meant for family time.

But over time, she realised there was something else happening.

Komal, who now focuses on mental health prevention, parenting, emotional wellbeing and relationships through The Prevention Project, understood that her son wasn’t pulling away from his family. He was beginning to seek independence.

“He wasn’t leaving us behind. He was leaving something behind to add something new to his personality,” she says.

Giving freedom a little responsibility

So, when her son wanted to stay home on Sundays, Komal found a small workaround.

She told him he could stay back — but he would have to cook for himself instead of ordering food from outside.

Initially, she guided him over the phone as he learnt to make simple things such as oats kheer and Maggi. She would keep checking, “Did you turn off the gas?” before finally hanging up once he sat down to eat.

Gradually, he became comfortable in the kitchen and began preparing dishes without needing her to guide him through every recipe.

The arrangement gave him what he was looking for: independence, along with responsibility.

Komal believes this gradual transfer of responsibility is important. Her son is homeschooled and plays cricket, which sometimes requires him to travel to different cities. Since turning 14, he has travelled across cities on his own, stayed in hotels near cricket grounds and managed his accommodation, food and transportation.

None of this happened overnight. It was a gradual process of teaching, observing, trusting and allowing him to take responsibility.

Learning when to step back

Komal admits that learning to step back wasn’t easy.

She remembers constantly reminding her son to drink water, even keeping track of how many glasses he had consumed. Eventually, both of them were frustrated.

Her sister told her, “He is 11. You have taught him what you needed to teach him. Now trust your parenting.”

That stayed with her.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Komal Baxi (@psychologist_komalbaxi)

Komal stopped micromanaging and began transferring responsibility back to her son. “I needed to trust my parenting. I needed to trust the process,” she says.

Her approach gradually shifted from doing things for him to being available when he needed her. Instead of turning every decision into a lesson, she began asking, “What do you think?” or “What do you want to do?”

Making room for mistakes — and Me Time

For Komal, giving a child freedom also means allowing them to make mistakes.

She remembers letting her son buy fragile toys that she knew might break quickly, while explaining the possibility to him. When they did break, she never said, “I told you so.”

Over time, he learnt to make more informed choices.

The same approach extends to his emotional life. When he loses a cricket match and feels upset, Komal and her husband don’t immediately try to make the sadness disappear. Sometimes, they simply hug him or kiss his forehead and give him the space to process what he is feeling.

At home, “Me Time” is treated as a healthy part of family life. And, interestingly, Komal feels that giving each other this space has brought them closer.

He still happily joins family rituals, including their Saturday Monopoly games, which can last three or four hours and involve plenty of laughter, teasing and arguments.

“Sometimes giving children space creates more room for connection,” she says.

From being their world to being their safe place

Komal’s biggest takeaway is that independence is not the opposite of connection.

When children say, “I want to go by myself,” “I want to stay home,” or “I can do it myself,” she believes parents don’t always need to hear it as rejection.

Sometimes, it simply means: “I am growing up.”

For Komal, parenting means gradually moving from being a child’s entire world to becoming their safe place in the world.

“I have realised that my job is not to make sure my son tells me everything. My job is to make sure he knows that he can tell me anything.”

And perhaps that is the balance she is still learning herself: knowing when to hold her child’s hand — and when to let go of it.

All images courtesy Komal Baxi

What if the next deadly flood isn’t just Nepal’s warning, but India’s too? 🌊 The Himalayas are heating up, glaciers are retreating, and extreme floods can turn deadly within minutes. India has already seen the warning signs in places like Chamoli and Sikkim.

But one woman has spent decades working to protect this fragile ecosystem. Dr Harshwanti Bisht’s Save Gangotri campaign has helped restore 6,000+ trees, strengthening the Himalayan landscape and supporting the ecosystems that communities downstream depend on. 🌱

The message is simple: protecting the Himalayas means protecting the people and communities downstream. As climate change increases pressure on mountain ecosystems, what should India do before the next major flood hits?

#NepalFloods #HimalayanFloods #Himalayas #FloodSafety #ClimateAction #ClimateChange #GlacialMelting #EnvironmentalProtection #SaveGangotri #HarshwantiBisht #ForestConservation #FloodRisk #HimalayanEcosystem #India #TheBetterIndia

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Why Himalayan Floods Are a Growing Risk for India
Could Nepal’s Floods Trigger a Warning for India?
How Climate Change Is Increasing Flood Risk in the Himalayas
Dr Harshwanti Bisht’s Fight to Protect the Himalayas
Why Protecting Himalayan Forests Could Help Reduce Flood Risk

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At dawn, a carcass is dragged into a fenced clearing near Assam’s Kulsi landscape.

By midday, dark shapes begin gathering overhead.

Soon, critically endangered vultures descend in cautious bursts onto the remains of a dead cow certified free of toxic veterinary drugs.

The site is what wildlife experts call a “vulture restaurant”. The name may sound unusual, but the crisis it addresses is anything but.

A vulture restaurant is a managed feeding station designed to give vultures access to safe food in areas where natural food sources have become scarce.

Across India, such feeding stations and vulture-safe zones are emerging as an important conservation measure. The birds face several threats, including starvation, habitat loss, poisoning, electrocution, unsafe veterinary drugs and the loss of nesting sites.

Assam is now preparing to launch its first vulture restaurant in Kulsi, under the guidance of the Vulture Conservation Breeding Centre (VCBC), Rani. 

Once among the most abundant birds in the Indian subcontinent, vultures have suffered one of the sharpest population declines recorded among birds. India’s vulture population, estimated at nearly four crore in the 1980s, fell by more than 97 to 99 percent within a few decades.

The White-rumped Vulture suffered an especially devastating decline of nearly 99.9 percent, largely linked to the widespread veterinary use of diclofenac. The painkiller is toxic to vultures when they feed on the carcasses of livestock treated with it.

India banned veterinary diclofenac in 2006. But the recovery of vulture populations has been slow and uneven.

The Better India spoke to Dr Sachin P Ranade, Assistant Director of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) and senior centre manager of VCBC, Rani, to understand why vultures are still struggling and why an unusual-sounding “vulture restaurant” could play a role in their recovery.

What is diclofenac and why is it harmful to vultures?

When livestock treated with diclofenac died, traces of the drug remained in their tissues.

Vultures feeding on these carcasses could suffer acute kidney failure. Post-mortem examinations found visceral gout, damaged organs and deposits of uric acid coating internal tissues.

India banned veterinary diclofenac in 2006 after sustained efforts by scientists and conservation groups. The government later restricted the use of large multi-dose vials of human diclofenac after they were found to be diverted for veterinary use.

But the damage had already been severe.

“The diclofenac crisis devastated vultures, but the problem today is much larger than a single drug,” says Dr Sachin.

For more than 25 years, he has worked on vulture conservation at breeding centres and in the field, including remote landscapes where surviving populations continue to depend on fragmented habitats.

Today, he says, vultures face a wider range of threats.

Urban expansion has changed how livestock carcasses are disposed of. Open dumping grounds have disappeared in many areas, traditional grazing landscapes have shrunk and nesting trees are being lost.

“Unsafe veterinary drugs continue to circulate in some regions. Electrocution, poisoning and food scarcity are becoming increasingly visible pressures,” he says.

A recent nationwide assessment by the Wildlife Institute of India found that nearly 70 percent of historically recorded nesting sites have disappeared. Of 425 documented sites, only around 120 remain active today.

In some breeding colonies, researchers have observed chicks dying after parent vultures were unable to find enough food for several days.

That is where the idea of a “vulture restaurant” becomes important.

A feeding station designed for survival

Despite the name, a vulture restaurant is not a wildlife tourism project.

It is a scientifically managed feeding site where livestock carcasses are screened to ensure they are free from toxic veterinary drugs before being placed near traditional nesting and roosting areas.

The aim is simple: provide vultures with safe food in landscapes where it is becoming harder to find.

“Starvation has emerged as a major and often overlooked reason behind vulture decline,” Ranade says.

He points to field observations from Maharashtra, where researchers monitoring White-rumped and Indian vultures documented chicks dying after remaining unfed for nearly 10 consecutive days.

“That confirmed food scarcity was directly affecting breeding success and survival,” he says.

In fragmented landscapes, vultures may have to travel farther to find carcasses. Breeding adults spend more energy searching for food, while chicks remain dependent on their parents in the nest.

“Feeding stations provide uncontaminated carcasses close to nesting habitats,” Ranade explains. “The idea is to prevent starvation deaths, improve breeding outcomes and stabilise surviving populations.”

The proposed Kulsi project follows this approach.

Villagers will reportedly be able to deposit livestock carcasses in designated, toxin-free areas where vultures can feed safely.

For Assam, the timing is significant

Earlier this year, Assam released its first captive-bred White-rumped Vultures into the wild, marking an important step in the state’s conservation efforts. Ranade was among the conservationists involved in overseeing the release.

The birds, raised in breeding centres, were gradually introduced to an unfamiliar landscape. Some quickly joined wild vultures circling nearby carcasses, while others initially returned to the safety of their enclosure perches.

Similar releases have taken place in West Bengal and Haryana as India expands captive breeding and reintroduction efforts.

But Ranade stresses that breeding centres alone cannot save the species.

“Breeding can be successful,” he says, “but unless there are safe feeding landscapes outside, their survival remains uncertain.”

The birds that once protected public health

Vultures have long had an uncomfortable place in the human imagination.

They are associated with death, decay and carcasses. Yet their role in the ecosystem is far more important than that image suggests.

Vultures are highly efficient scavengers. Their digestive systems allow them to consume carcasses carrying pathogens that could pose a risk to other animals.

“Their digestive systems are extraordinarily efficient. Vulture stomach acid can neutralise pathogens that would prove dangerous to many other scavengers, including bacteria linked to anthrax, botulism and rabies transmission,” explains Ranade.

A carcass that might otherwise lie exposed for days can be stripped clean within hours by a flock of vultures.

When vultures disappeared, however, those carcasses did not disappear with them.

Instead, some became food sources for feral dogs and rats.

“Vultures are ecological sanitizers,” Ranade says. “Their decline disrupted the ecological cycle itself.”

That is why the loss of vultures matters beyond forests and rural landscapes. Their disappearance can affect how carcasses are disposed of and how other scavengers interact with them.

For conservationists, feeding stations are therefore more than places where birds are given food. They are part of a broader effort to rebuild landscapes where vultures can survive.

Conservation that depends on villages

Managed feeding programmes and vulture-safe zones are already operating in several states.

Maharashtra’s Raigad district was among the earlier landscapes where feeding stations were used to support local vulture populations.

Jharkhand’s Koderma district established a vulture restaurant supported by carcasses sourced from gaushalas and municipalities.

Gujarat recently announced a “Giddh Restaurant” near the Pavagadh hills for endangered Long-billed Vultures.

In Chhattisgarh’s Indravati Tiger Reserve, conservation efforts combine feeding stations with GPS monitoring and village volunteer networks known as “Giddha Mitra Dal”.

But Ranade says the success of such programmes depends on more than infrastructure.

Local communities have an important role to play.

In areas where vulture conservation is working, villagers help identify nesting sites, report poisoned carcasses, protect roosting trees and ensure that livestock carcasses are not contaminated with harmful drugs.

This community involvement is especially important because carcass dumping sites are often seen as dirty or unsafe spaces. In some villages, vultures are also mistakenly viewed as birds that spread disease rather than help control it.

Changing that perception can be as important as building a feeding station.

A return that is still uncertain

There is cautious hope in Assam’s Kulsi landscape.

Safe feeding grounds could help support breeding colonies. Captive-bred vultures released into the wild will have a better chance of finding uncontaminated food. And local communities could become important partners in protecting the birds and their habitats.

For Ranade and others who have spent decades working on the vulture crisis, the idea of a “vulture restaurant” is ultimately about something much bigger than feeding birds.

It is about giving a species that once played a vital role in India’s landscapes a safer chance to return.

The Mandakini rose to 135.2 metres, its highest level in 23 years. 🌊 As record floods hit Chitrakoot, IAS Officer and DM Pulkit Garg and his team quickly moved to warn vulnerable communities and evacuate affected villages.

When the floodwaters rose again, boats and helicopters were deployed, helping rescue more than 700 people. Relief supplies, food and drinking water were also delivered to families affected by the floods, while Pulkit Garg remained on the ground overseeing the rescue and relief efforts.

Because during a crisis, people don’t just need orders. They need someone who shows up, takes charge and stays until the work is done. 🇮🇳

#ChitrakootFlood #PulkitGarg #IASOfficer #FloodRescue #Chitrakoot #MandakiniRiver #FloodRelief #UPFloods #UttarPradesh #DisasterManagement #RescueOperation #IASOfficerIndia #GoodNews #RealHeroes #TheBetterIndia

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How IAS Pulkit Garg Led the Chitrakoot Flood Rescue
Chitrakoot Floods: 700+ People Rescued as Mandakini Rises
* Mandakini River Hits 23-Year High: Chitrakoot Rescue
* IAS Pulkit Garg’s Ground-Level Response to Chitrakoot Floods
* Chitrakoot Flood Rescue: How 700+ People Were Evacuated

The story has been reported and written by Vasudev Jagarlamudi. He works at the intersection of marketing and technology, with a deep love for writing — from ad copy to occasional storytelling. Intrigued by how movements are built, he enjoys bringing communities together around ideas that inspire change. At The Better India, he writes on education, social change, and agriculture. 

Eight years ago, The Better India wrote about a Telangana police officer who was guiding UPSC aspirants through WhatsApp — for free.

Mahesh Muralidhar Bhagwat has not stopped.

Today, his mentorship network reaches thousands of civil services aspirants across the country. In UPSC Civil Services 2025, 331 of the 958 selected candidates had been mentored by his team — more than one in three successful candidates.

The numbers are even more striking in the Indian Forest Service. In 2025, 84 of the 148 selected candidates — more than half — credited Bhagwat’s mentorship. For three consecutive years, from 2023 to 2025, the All India Rank 1 in the Indian Forest Service came from his groups.

And in the UPSC Central Armed Police Forces examination in 2024, 66 of 459 selected candidates were mentored through the programme, with All India Ranks 2, 5, 13, 20 and 35 among them.

Bhagwat himself has since risen to the highest rank in the Telangana police, becoming Director General of Police in April 2026.

Yet the early-morning alarm has not changed.

Neither has the WhatsApp group.

The village boy who once doubted himself

To understand why Bhagwat spends hours mentoring civil services aspirants, often before and after a demanding police job, it helps to go back to Pathardi in Ahmednagar (now Ahilyanagar) district of Maharashtra.

He grew up there until Class 10 before moving to Pune for college.

For a young student from a rural background, the language of the UPSC examination seemed intimidating.

“I had an inferiority complex about English. My background was rural,” he recalls.

Then he saw something that changed his perception of what was possible.

A college senior wrote the UPSC examination in Marathi and cleared it. Bhagwat also read about Bhushan Gagrani, the former Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai, who secured All India Rank 3 while taking Marathi literature and history as his optionals and writing the examination entirely in his mother tongue.

“That is when I realised, we can do something. Opportunities are there.”

After graduating from Government Engineering College, Pune (COEP) in 1990, Bhagwat joined a government coaching centre in Mumbai. He later took up a well-paying CSR job at Tata Motors — not because he had abandoned the UPSC dream, but because he needed to finance it.

He studied wherever he could: on bus rides to villages he had adopted outside Pune and even on trucks carrying water to rural communities.

In 1994, before his UPSC prelims results had even been declared, he resigned.

“There was a lot of resistance. Such a lucrative job you are leaving. But it was a calculated risk,” he says.

The risk paid off.

He cleared the examination and joined the IPS in the 1995 batch. After spending his first two years in Manipur, he moved to Hyderabad in 1999.

But he never forgot what it felt like to prepare largely on his own — or how much the small acts of guidance from seniors had meant to him.

That experience would eventually shape one of the country's largest free mentorship networks for civil services aspirants.

It started with one WhatsApp group

The origins of the initiative can be traced to another aspirant who knew exactly what that isolation felt like.

Nitish Pathode, now a Deputy Commissioner of Customs in Ahmedabad and an IRS officer, had arrived in Delhi from Chandrapur, Maharashtra, to prepare for the UPSC examination.

At the time, hundreds of Maharashtra candidates stayed at Maharashtra Sadan. But there was no common platform to help them navigate the final stage of the examination.

“Questions about what to wear, how to handle the DAF, how to face the panel — everyone navigated it alone,” Pathode recalls.

In 2015, he created a WhatsApp group initially meant for friends preparing for the personality test.

Then he began adding mentors.

One of them was Mahesh Bhagwat.

“He was very helpful,” Pathode says.

The group, eventually named the Maharashtra civil services mentorship group, continued to grow.

Today, roughly 300 Maharashtra candidates reach the UPSC interview stage every year. Around 100 are selected — and about 80 percent of those successful candidates are part of the group.

What began as one young aspirant's attempt to solve a problem of isolation became the foundation for something much larger.

Bhagwat saw the potential of a structured, accessible mentorship network and began his own WhatsApp group for Telangana and Andhra Pradesh aspirants.

It eventually expanded into an all-India network.

The final 275 marks

Bhagwat's focus was clear: the UPSC personality test.

The final 275 marks can determine whether a candidate joins the civil services or spends another year preparing for the examination.

His approach begins long before a candidate walks into the interview room.

Once the UPSC mains results are declared, Bhagwat reads each candidate's Detailed Application Form, or DAF.

The document contains details about a candidate's hometown, parents' occupation, education, hobbies, optional subjects, work experience, service preferences and cadre preferences.

He reads every word.

“The interview does not start with national or international events. It starts with your DAF. And on that alone, a candidate can face four to five questions,” he says.

He then speaks to candidates individually, usually for 45 minutes to an hour — often before heading to work or during his commute.

Candidates record the conversations, make notes and prepare.

Once they emerge from their actual interviews, many call Bhagwat again and share the questions they were asked.

He compiles them into a growing, crowd-sourced question bank that becomes more useful with every batch.

The mentorship is intensely personal despite being delivered largely through something as simple as WhatsApp and phone calls.

Lakshmi Priya, who scored 240 out of 300 in the Indian Forest Service personality test, among the highest interview scores in recent years, received her DAF preparation session while Bhagwat was travelling.

“He gave me 30 minutes of DAF discussion questions while he was on the move,” she says. “That guidance was instrumental.”

Tejaswini Singh, who reached out to Bhagwat after seeing his post on LinkedIn, says the access to serving officers made a crucial difference.

“The programme had interaction opportunities with officers in service — providing real-world examples and insights into their workings. That is not found elsewhere.”

Then there is Ishita Kishore, who went on to secure All India Rank 1 in the UPSC Civil Services Examination.

She had heard about Bhagwat's programme through other aspirants.

“Many people told me about Mahesh Sir's WhatsApp group and mentorship programme,” she says. “Immediately I also reached out and asked to be added.”

But what she found was more than interview preparation.

She found a community.

“With so many coaching institutes and so much information, an aspirant is almost always confused about whom to listen to. UPSC requires you to be very focused and listen to one thing. This is where the mentorship programme comes in — it fills the trust gap.”

“This is not a commercial programme. It's not a market. It's a community.”

3,000 students — and Rs 15 lakh a month foregone

The scale of Bhagwat's work becomes clearer when viewed through the economics of the UPSC coaching ecosystem.

Shubham Aggarwal, Director of Vidyapeeth IAS in Ambala and a political analyst who writes for The Times of India, has been associated with the programme for four years.

He puts a number to what Bhagwat could potentially earn from the students he mentors.

“Mahesh Bhagwat sir has around 3,000 students under his name. If each student gives him 500 rupees — which is the bare minimum, institutions charge 2,000 — within a month he would get 15 lakh rupees. But we don't go after that.”

Instead, Bhagwat has built a model around public service rather than payment.

The results suggest what that decision has produced.

UPSC Civil Services Examination 2025

• 331 of 958 selected candidates were mentored by Bhagwat's team — more than one in three

• Three of the top 10 rankers in 2024 came from the group

• Harshita Goyal, who secured Rank 2 in 2024, was among them

UPSC CAPF 2024

• 66 of 459 selected candidates were mentored through the programme

• AIR 2, 5, 13, 20 and 35 came from the group

Indian Forest Service

• The All India Rank 1 came from Bhagwat's groups for three consecutive years

• Ritvika Pandey — AIR 1, 2023

• Kanika Anabh — AIR 1, 2024

• Basavaraj Dhareppa Kempawad — AIR 1, 2025

• In IFS 2025, 84 of 148 selected candidates — more than half — credited his mentorship

These are not the results of a single teacher working alone.

They are the result of a network.

Thirty mentors, one mission

Around Bhagwat, a team of nearly 30 mentors has developed organically.

Bhagwat remains at the centre of the process. He analyses the candidates' DAFs and then connects them with mentors suited to their areas of preparation.

Dr Shailendra Deolankar, Director of Higher Education in Maharashtra, who holds a PhD in International Relations from JNU and has authored 22 books on foreign affairs, handles global affairs and foreign policy.

He conducts at least 10 sessions per batch, with each session lasting a minimum of two hours, every Sunday.

“He is a true teacher in police. By heart an educator, by heart a teacher,” says Dr Shailendra of Bhagwat.

For him, mentoring civil services aspirants is an investment in the country's future.

“These are the assets of India — the ambassadors of this country. If we invest our time and expertise in these students, we know they are going to have the right career. That is why I consider this the most valued intellectual investment of mine.”

Aggarwal covers political science, international relations and current affairs, alongside one-on-one sessions with candidates.

At times, he conducts 500 or more individual sessions within a two- to three-month period.

He has also seen just how relentless Bhagwat's own schedule can be.

“Since 5 AM the online newspapers appear — he starts delivering study materials to students since 5 AM, and I have seen him work at 12, 1 the next day.”

His motivation is simple.

“If I talk to a certain child and he becomes an IAS officer — what better than that?”

The network extends beyond civil services.

CAPF groups bring together retired Additional Directors General from the BSF, DIGs from the CRPF and SSB, and commandants from the CISF — serving and retired officers who mentor candidates preparing for their respective forces.

Bhagwat's wife, herself a forest service officer, regularly sends him wildlife and ecology articles for the IFS group.

Former candidates have also become mentors. Shreyas Srivastava, who secured Rank 9 in the IFS 2020 after five attempts, is now part of the mentoring network.

Bhagwat describes his recruitment philosophy with a laugh.

“We do hunting also. He's doing something good for students — call him, bring him.”

There is one condition.

“We don't want anyone commercial. Even if they run paid classes elsewhere, for this interview preparation, it is free.”

When mentorship became something much bigger

For all the impressive examination statistics, perhaps the clearest picture of Bhagwat's idea of public service comes from a candidate whose journey had little to do with rankings.

Devanand Telgote, an IIT Bombay graduate from Akola, Maharashtra, was preparing for the Indian Forest Service.

In 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown, he had travelled to Delhi for interview preparation. When the city shut down, he returned home.

Then he contracted COVID-19.

Severely.

Bhagwat arranged for him to be airlifted to KIMS Hospital in Hyderabad.

Devanand spent four months in the ICU, including periods on ECMO support. His chest severity score rose to 20, indicating nearly 80 percent lung damage.

His friends from IIT Bombay raised more than a crore of rupees towards his treatment. For 120 days, the hospital bill was around one lakh rupees a day.

Bhagwat continued visiting him in the hospital, wearing full PPE.

When Devanand recovered enough to attempt the examination, Bhagwat approached the UPSC with a request that he be allowed to take his personality test through video conferencing.

It was the first time the commission had made such an arrangement for a candidate.

Doctors assessed whether Devanand could speak continuously for 25 to 30 minutes.

At that point, he could not even count from one to twenty.

The interview was deferred.

Devanand eventually recovered, reappeared and secured All India Rank 112 in the Indian Forest Service on his first interview attempt.

But COVID had permanently affected his lungs.

He failed the mandatory 25-kilometre walking test twice — each time by only a few minutes.

He is now preparing for the civil services mains.

Bhagwat remains in his corner.

“The programme and especially all kinds of help provided by Bhagwat Sir have been the fulcrum on which my success relied. Sir provided constant motivation even in miserable situations like COVID-19 or failures at the interview stage,” Devanand says.

And that, perhaps, is the part of the programme that cannot be captured by selection percentages.

“He is also there for those who don't make it,” says Lakshmi Priya. “He dedicatedly motivates people all the time.”

The same question, asked differently

The UPSC mentorship network is only one expression of Bhagwat's larger approach to public service.

Since 2017, through Operation Smile, he has been involved in running worksite schools inside brick kilns on the outskirts of Hyderabad.

The schools serve children of migrant workers from Odisha's Naupada, Bolangir, Kalahandi and Jajnagar districts, whose families arrive in Hyderabad every November and return home in May.

Without the schools, many of these children would spend those months working.

With them, they study.

As recently as June 2026, on World Day Against Child Labour, Bhagwat was continuing this work.

Across 23 operations as CID chief, he rescued 900 bonded labourers and children from hazardous brick kilns, safely repatriating them to their home districts in Odisha.

At first glance, the two parts of his work appear worlds apart.

On one side are UPSC aspirants — many of them graduates of India's finest institutions, preparing to become civil servants.

On the other are children growing up in migrant labour communities, at risk of spending their childhoods inside brick kilns.

But Bhagwat sees a common thread.

Who gets an opportunity?

And who gets to decide?

The ripple effect

Perhaps the most powerful measure of Bhagwat's work is not the number of candidates who clear an examination.

It is what they do afterwards.

The mentorship network has developed a pay-it-forward model in which successful candidates return as mentors themselves.

Pathode, Lakshmi Priya and Ishita Kishore plan to return as mentors.

The DGP who still answers his phone

In April 2026, Mahesh Bhagwat was promoted to Director General of Police — one of the highest ranks in Indian policing.

The promotion changed his designation.

It did not change the routine.

If you are a UPSC aspirant preparing for Civil Services, Indian Forest Service, or CAPF and wish to connect with the mentorship group, you can reach DGP Mahesh Bhagwat at mmbips@gmail.com and via WhatsApp on 9908017349.

A coconut falls from a palm, lands in the sea, and begins a journey that could take it thousands of kilometres away. Days turn into weeks. Waves push it along, currents carry it further, and yet the seed inside can remain alive until the coconut finally reaches land.

It sounds unlikely. After all, most seeds need the right soil, water, and conditions to survive. A coconut has something very different going for it. Its entire fruit is built to protect what is inside.

Scientists believe this ability to float and remain viable helped coconuts spread naturally across tropical islands and coastlines long before people began carrying them from one place to another. One study estimates that a wild coconut could remain viable at sea for around 110 days, potentially travelling about 4,800 km if carried by a favourable current.

But how does it manage this?

The coconut is almost like a natural boat

The first secret is the thick, fibrous husk surrounding the coconut.

That rough outer layer is not just waste that we remove before eating the fruit. It plays an important role in keeping the seed afloat. Inside the coconut is a hard shell, along with the edible kernel and a cavity that contributes to its buoyancy.

The combination allows the fruit to stay on the surface of the water instead of sinking to the ocean floor. Research on coconut fruit biology describes the thick husk and internal cavity as important adaptations for floating in seawater.

Think of it as a seed packed inside its own protective case.

The seed is protected from the saltwater

Floating is only half the challenge.

The coconut also has to keep the embryo inside alive while surrounded by seawater. Its thick husk and hard inner shell help shield the developing plant from the outside environment.

This is particularly important because the seed cannot afford to start growing in the middle of the ocean. A coconut seedling emerging into seawater would not survive for long.

That is why delayed germination is so important.

Studies suggest that slow germination may actually have been one of the traits that helped coconuts spread across islands. A coconut that germinated too quickly would use up its reserves while still floating in the sea. A coconut that waited could travel further before beginning its next stage of life.

Inside, the coconut carries its own food

The coconut does not reach a beach empty-handed.

The seed has a large food reserve in the form of the endosperm, which eventually becomes the familiar coconut flesh. This reserve supports the young plant during germination and early growth.

The Indian Coconut Board notes that coconut seedlings are nourished by the endosperm during their early development. Under nursery conditions, tall varieties generally begin germinating within 60 to 130 days after sowing, while dwarf varieties can germinate sooner.

This stored food matters because a newly arrived coconut cannot immediately depend on rich soil. It needs enough energy to produce its first shoot and roots.

Then the ocean has to deliver it to the right place

Surviving the journey does not mean the coconut can grow anywhere.

Its natural destination is generally a tropical shoreline. When a coconut is washed onto a beach, its shape and husk can help keep it from immediately being carried back into the sea. Once it remains above the tide line and receives fresh water, germination can begin.

Researchers have suggested that the angular shape of the fruit can help prevent it from rolling back into the water, giving the emerging roots a better chance of taking hold on the beach.

This is why coconut palms are so strongly associated with tropical shores.

The 4,800 km journey needs a little context

The famous figure of 4,800 km comes from an estimate based on coconuts remaining capable of germination after floating in seawater for up to 110 days. The distance was calculated using the speed of a favourable ocean current.

It does not mean that every coconut can simply float 4,800 km and grow when it reaches land. The original evidence was limited, and later researchers have questioned how broadly the figure should be applied.

What is much clearer is that coconuts possess several characteristics that make ocean dispersal possible. They float, protect their embryo, carry their own food, and can delay germination.

A seed designed for island life

This makes the coconut more than a fruit that happens to float.

Over evolutionary time, these features allowed coconuts to reach islands where there may have been little vegetation and relatively few competing plants. Researchers studying coconut dispersal suggest that this ability to arrive on beaches, germinate and establish itself helped the palm spread across coral atolls and tropical coastlines.

Humans later carried coconuts much further, planting them across tropical regions for food, water, oil, fibre and other uses. India itself has a long history with the crop, and the ICAR Central Plantation Crops Research Institute continues to develop coconut varieties suited to different growing conditions.

So the next time you see a coconut washed up on a beach, it is worth looking at it differently.

That hard shell, thick husk and seemingly ordinary fruit are carrying something delicate inside. The coconut does not need a ship to cross the sea. In the right current, its own natural design can give a seed a chance to travel thousands of kilometres, wait for land, and then begin again.