-The Times of India GURUGRAM: The dumping of thousands of used bottles has created a giant mound of plastic waste on the fringes of the Basai wetland in Gurugram, not far from the controversial plant to treat construction and demolition waste that has drawn strong protests from environmental activists. This plastic waste mound, say local residents, is a recent development. Next to it is a privately run plastic compressing and recycling unit...

-India Water Portal The editor of a new book that lays out alternative futures for India discusses India, democracy and development with a noted journalist. Alternative Futures: India Unshackled is a new book that dares to imagine what India could be. Published by Authors Upfront, 35 author-activists, researchers and thinkers have drawn upon their experiences to write on alternative political, ecological, economic and sociocultural scenarios that will benefit India in its...

-The Indian Express Booming Indian antelope populations threaten crops in many areas. Farmers are reluctant to strike against them, so the herds have only feral packs to fear. A couple of centuries ago, some four million blackbuck roamed the Indian landmass south of the Himalayas from undivided “Punjab to Nepal and probably in most parts of the Peninsula where the country is wooded and hilly, but not in dense jungle”. At...

-TheWire.in Unless consumer preferences shift to climate resistant crops, goals associated with the policy won’t materialize. On March 14, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) uploaded a draft of the National Forest Policy 2018, three decades years after the last such policy. The draft appears to be an attempt to shift the approach towards forestry in India – specifically, from a local community- and ecology-centric approach emphasised in the...

-Scroll.in First it refused to make consent of forest dwellers mandatory for growing plantations on their lands, now it breaks the promise of even consulting them. The Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change has drafted new rules that dilute the rights of Adivasis and other forest dwellers to independently decide how their traditional forestlands are used. The new rules, formulated in February, give the forest bureaucracy across the country the power...