Articles & Op-Eds

In an era of accelerating ecological crisis — of climate change, biodiversity loss, and deepening social inequities — we need more Gadgils: Thinkers with intellectual courage, moral clarity, and the willingness to engage with diverse views In the long arc of Indian history, only a handful of scientists have truly [...]

I have travelled extensively over the past three decades and never once fallen sick outside India — until my visit to Brazil last month for COP30. A simple viral infection ended up becoming a mirror, revealing how differently India and Brazil approach antibiotic use, and why this difference matters. In [...]

Every winter, Delhi’s air pollution debate follows a familiar script. We look for villains, argue over blame, ignore science and solutions. This year has been no different – except that it has bordered on the absurd. Pollution season opened with the Supreme Court allowing “green crackers”, followed by Delhi govt’s [...]

Across the world, antibiotics are viewed as curative medicines — to be used only when truly necessary. In India, they tend to be used preventively, routinely prescribed for viral infections that the human body is fully capable of handling. I have travelled extensively over the past three decades and never [...]

For more than a decade, Delhi has experimented with various pollution control measures — the ‘odd-even scheme’, smog towers, water cannon, tree plantation, the Graded Response Action Plan or GRAP, (which restricts industry, construction, and vehicular activity during winter), and now cloud seeding. Despite these efforts, the city continues to [...]

The world needs a new multilateral architecture for a new phase of climate action. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had declared the 30th Conference of Parties (COP30) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as the “COP of truth”. And truth, indeed, was unmistakable in Belém. [...]

The 30th UN Climate Change Conference in Belem, Brazil, is taking place against the backdrop of a major pushback against climate action. The United States has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. The European Union has diluted its 2040 climate target. Some of the world’s largest banks—J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, [...]

MOST of us know the Damodar Valley either from school textbooks or from its portrayal in films like Kala Patthar and Gangs of Wasseypur. Yet the valley is far more than what is captured in books or on screen. Spanning the coal-rich districts of Jharkhand and West Bengal, the Damodar Valley — often called India’s [...]

Experiments around the world have already established that cloud seeding can’t defeat air pollution. What Delhi is doing in their wake can’t even be called innovation. It’s just political theatre Yesterday, to mitigate air pollution, Delhi govt, in collaboration with IIT Kanpur, conducted the first cloud-seeding trial in areas like [...]

World Ozone Day is a good reminder of what refrigerants used in millions of air-conditioners do to environment. Hydrofluorocarbons heat up earth even more than CO2. The ozone hole is healing. The layer that shields us from the sun’s deadly ultraviolet rays was severely damaged by chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) [...]

On September 2, 2025, Bhubaneswar became the first Indian city to release an Integrated Heat and Cooling Action Plan (IHCAP) to comprehensively tackle two growing crises—rising heat stress and the explosion in air conditioning demand. Heat stress is not new to India. Over the past two decades, the country has [...]

Spanning the coal-rich districts of Jharkhand and West Bengal, Damodar Valley (DV)—India’s ‘Ruhr Valley’—has powered the country’s growth since Independence. Coal from Jharia and Raniganj has fuelled India’s rise while steel plants of Durgapur and Bokaro, and fertiliser factories of Sindri became ‘temples of modern India’. Today, the region stands [...]