Every AI query has a physical footprint – and it is measured in something far more scarce than electricity The query you send to a chatbot seems like nothing. Not using any paper, fuel or obvious resources in any way. However, behind your query, deep inside some climate-controlled data centre full of buzzing computers, there’s…
Wangari Maathai, the Nobel Prize, and 51 million Trees The Child Who Was Told Not to Disturb the Fig Tree In the hills of Nyeri, in central Kenya, a fig tree grew near the home of a young girl’s family. Her grandmother told her it was sacred and must not be disturbed. As a child,…
Climate change is not something that will happen someday. It is happening now. It is changing the way people live in India. The temperature is getting higher, the air is getting thicker because of the humidity, and the heat is staying longer every year. This is a problem for a lot of people, especially those…
In Geneva, on the sidelines of the WTO Trade and Environment Week 2026, India did something that would have seemed improbable a decade ago. Officials from the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change walked into a multilateral forum and presented India not as a developing country seeking climate exemptions, but as one showcasing a…
Every winter, Delhi’s air turns into a slow emergency. Children are kept indoors. Hospitals fill up. AQI readings scroll past catastrophic on national television. This June, the Union Cabinet approved a ₹9,585 crore scheme to replace approximately 2.07 lakh ageing trucks and buses in the Delhi-NCR region with BS-VI or cleaner alternatives — a funded…
On the morning of World Environment Day 2026, Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri did something deceptively simple: he filled up a car. The vehicle was a Maruti Suzuki Wagon R Flex Fuel. This was India’s first mass-market flex-fuel car, launched just a day earlier. The fuel was E85, a blend of 80–85% ethanol and 14-19%…
In the rain-fed rice cultivation areas of Odisha and Maharashtra, drought years are not gender-blind events. In fact, research based on national sample survey data in India, conducted by the Asia-Pacific branch of UNDP, has shown that when rainfall is poor, women farm workers earn less in terms of wages than men, specifically in rice-growing…
India is at a tipping point in terms of its development trajectory. Urbanization is happening fast, with people moving from rural to urban areas in search of economic growth. But both urban and rural areas are under threat from the consequences of climate change. The rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, droughts, floods and other climate risks…
As India races to become a global AI hub, its data centres are quietly consuming water from some of the country’s most stressed aquifers. The environmental cost of India’s digital economy is a policy conversation we are overdue to have. Every time you stream a film on a Mumbai morning commute, every email you send…
For years, corporations have measured their environmental footprint by what happens inside their four walls, the electricity they consume, the fuel their trucks burn, the emissions their factories produce. Clean up the factory floor, switch to renewable energy for the head office, and the sustainability report writes itself. The problem? That number, tidy as it…
