-The Wire Science NASA released a satellite image last year showing that India, with China, is “greening the world”. The greening has been thanks to the colonial ideologies that have bequeathed the legacy of greening India, which has been upheld by the subsequent governments. The British drafted the first National Forest Policy for India to convert its forests into timber production stands. Decades later, the Indian government safeguarded these stands with...

-The Telegraph The chief minister announced a new scheme — Matir Shristi — for six backward districts in the western part of the state Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday announced a series of schemes for income generation to ensure livelihood for rural populace in the post-lockdown period as the state government realised the need of securing flow of funds at the grassroots level. “Life and livelihood have come to a halt (because of the...

-The Hindu Among this year’s Padma Shri awardees are a father and daughter who turned a barren wasteland into a riot of trees and crops Furrowed with deep gullies, its topsoil all but gone, this degraded patch of land near Odagaon in Odisha’s Nayagarh district was once a dense forest. Whenever nature tried to reclaim it, the little shoots would be nibbled away by goats and sheep. The villagers who owned the...

-Down to Earth Another 30% of the county’s land is undergoing degradation. What does this mean for the country where more than 60% peopel depends on agriculture? Every year during the monsoon, Hemant Waman Chowre faces a peculiar situation. On the one hand, he hopes for good rainfall to water his crops but on the other, he is scared, for even a mild shower can destroy his saplings. Chowre is a 35-year-old farmer...

-Down to Earth Over 60 years after the country got its first plan to rejuvenate the rivers, not a single basin has been spared from overexploitation All the 20 river basins of the country share the story of the Cauvery: how human interference has changed every river’s form and flow pattern over the past few decades. Water in the country’s three major rivers — the Indus, the Brahmaputra and the Ganga — has...