Illustration by Soniya Pondcar
If 2025 confirmed anything, it is that the environment is no longer a sectoral concern, a silo for activists or scientists, or a problem deferred to future generations. It is the terrain on which India’s most immediate political, economic, and social struggles are now being fought. Decisions taken in boardrooms, ministries, and distant capitals are redistributing risk on the ground, determining who breathes clean air, who loses land, who migrates, and who is expected to endure loss quietly.
The ten stories in this package follow that redistribution. They move from ecological collapse that now threatens human health to forms of labour made invisible by geography and caste. They examine megaprojects cleared with questionable data, climate finance framed as global bargaining, and conservation failures that rebound on society itself. They stay with Adivasi communities resisting dispossession, villages rebuilding water commons through collective effort, and families displaced by storms with little institutional support. They track polluted rivers turned into spectacles of governance and climate migration unfolding in the absence of policy or recognition. Taken together, these stories insist on a simple truth. Environmental damage is never abstract. It is lived, uneven, and political. And in today’s India, it is shaping the future faster than our institutions are willing to admit.
Leave a Reply