-The Indian Express People do not want to risk their homes, fields, Pastures, forests and rivers in the name of development. Most of such development work in the Himalayas is being carried out without an understanding of its fragility, seismicity, glacial behaviour, climatic changes and their collective destructive power. The flash floods due to the burst of an artificial lake created by a huge landslide (rock, frozen mud and ice) in Rishi...

-GoI Monitor Herders faced discrimination and hardships in managing seasonal migrations Jaga Vashraam Rabari of Vrajvani village in Kutch migrates every summer with his herd of animals for eight months. Villagers in Pattan, around 300 km from home, usually invite and welcome his group but this time, they were not allowed to enter the villages due to rumours around COVID 19. “The presence of police personnel also scared us and our mobility was seriously...

-Scroll.in The trend is also linked to recent locust outbreaks, as large quantities of vegetation provide food for locust swarms. Ravindranath lives in the heart of the Thar desert in India. He and his family are agropastoralists – people who grow crops and rear livestock – in the village of Kalu in Bikaner district, Rajasthan. But the dry grasslands that people like Ravindranath have depended on for centuries for pasture are slowly being...

-CaravanMagazine.in As swarms of desert locusts descended upon India this year, toxic insecticides were sprayed over two lakh hectares of land to contain their spread. But the measure could have serious environmental and health consequences. India’s Locust Warning Organization, or LWO, a body under the ministry of agriculture, uses fifteen different formulations of eight insecticides for controlling their spread. Five of these insecticides are banned, restricted or withdrawn in one or...

-Frontline.in As the threat of a locust attack looms, and as climate change threatens to increase the frequency of such attacks, Indian agriculture needs a more durable and long-term strategy to fight the menace. Life in the desert is defined by scarcity of water. The harsh, prolonged dry spells further restrict the availability of food resources for much of the year. Plants and animals in the desert have evolved various strategies to...