Anusreeta Dutta

As wetlands disappear beneath concrete, Mumbai’s resilience to floods and climate shocks is being severely undermined. Every monsoon season, Mumbai falls into a similar pattern. The rain comes down hard, flooding streets, stopping trains, leaving neighbourhoods wet for days and officials playing catch-up. Heavy rains and climate change are often blamed for these disruptions, but an equally important, but far less talked about, factor is the decline of the city’s wetlands. Threatened...

India’s battle against pollution cannot be won without confronting the social inequities hidden within the smog. Each winter, India’s cities disappear behind a familiar grey curtain. Schools are closed; flights are delayed while hospitals are full of respiratory patients Air pollution has become so common in India that it is like a season in itself. But beneath this ecological catastrophe lies another, less talked-about crisis. India’s pollution is very uneven. Not everyone breathes the same...

From debt traps and failed irrigation to climate shocks and political neglect, the agrarian crisis in Vidarbha reveals the deep structural failures haunting India’s farming economy. Every monsoon, as clouds gather over the dry plains of eastern Maharashtra, famers in the Vidarbha region look up with a mix of hope and despair. They are hopeful, as rain means life for their crops. Fear because, rain or no rain, the debts remain, prices fall, and the future remains uncertain. Vidarbha has long...