When the India AI Impact Summit wrapped up in New Delhi this February, the headline numbers were about investment: over $200 billion in commitments, a $15 billion data centre hub from Google in Visakhapatnam, and a national AI market expected to grow from roughly $9.5 billion in 2024 to $130 billion by 2032. Less discussed,…
Amitav Ghosh never set out to write a polemic with The Great Derangement. The book started life as the Berlin Family Lectures at the University of Chicago, and you can still feel that origin in its final form: it’s restless, essayistic, and willing to chase an argument wherever it leads. Ghosh roams across literary criticism,…
We ask AI for things dozens of times a day without ever once thinking about what it costs the planet to answer me. A recipe idea here, a draft email there, maybe a generated image for a birthday card, a quick summary of a paper we don’t have time to read. It’s so fast, so…
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…
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 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…
The Temple That Nobody Photographed There is a 9th century temple in a village in Odisha that receives no tourist buses, no CISF security detail, and no World Heritage plaque. Its sanctum holds a damaged but intact icon. Its walls carry inscriptions that have not been fully transcribed. Twice in the past decade, local residents…
Here’s what the WRI analysis actually shows. The team reviewed 46 World Bank-financed health projects across low- and middle-income countries and came up with numbers that belong in every health ministry’s budget talks. For a country of 25 million people, putting money into seven areas of climate-health preparedness such as disease surveillance, climate-informed planning, resilient…
