📍India’s appalling rank on environmental health

Environmental scientists and researchers at Yale University and Columbia University bring out a major biennial report on the environmental health and environmental performance of countries. The 2026 report shows that India has been performing extraordinarily poorly on this matrix, ranking last (180th out of 180 countries studied) in 2022. It showed a sliver of improvement in 2024, ending up, still at the bottom at 176th out of 180. In 2026, it continued to remain at the bottom most step, 176th out of 177.

By any standard, that is an abysmal record. The report highlights an acute “development-versus-pollution” tension. India has tried to provide energy access to millions of people, relying heavily on coal with its attendant problems of deadly emissions leading to severe air pollution and shooting greenhouse gases. Other factors that were mentioned were poor biodiversity protection (small wonder given the scale at which we are destroying forests), and a sharp decline in looking after marine protected areas, as the primary reasons for the low ranking.  

It is embarrassing that instead of being self critical and trying to understand why our performance is so poor and how to fix it, the Indian Ministry of Environment has argued that the Yale-Columbia report is derived using “unscientific methods”. Really? Yale and Columbia with their record of top quality work on environmental issues out of world class labs, don’t know what they are talking about? And the pitiful occupants of our Environment Ministry have the academic excellence to challenge the work of some of the best universities in the world? A little humility and some introspection would be in order here.

The report: https://epi.yale.edu/region/2026/southern-asia 

 📍How Climate Change is Starving the Himalayan Herders

The pastoral communities of India (the herders who rear sheep, goats, cattle, camels as also yaks in our northern and hilly states) live a transhumance life, moving across regions with their animals, in search of pastures. Such a system allows grazed pastures to recover and regenerate while new pastures ensure their animals had sufficient food throughout the year.

The livelihood of the mountain pastoralists is based on a delicate seasonal migration: taking their herds high up into the mountain pastures (bugyals) in the summer, and bringing them down to the valleys in the winter.

But global warming is disrupting this ancient rhythm. As the Himalayan glaciers melt at an increasingly rapid pace and weather patterns become highly erratic, the vegetation cycles of these high-altitude pastures are changing. The grass is often not there when the herders arrive.

Their traditional knowledge tells them when to move their flocks, but climate change has erased the reliability of that knowledge. Without adequate grazing lands, the animals starve, and the traditional pastoralist economy collapses. 

Clearly, there is an urgent need to draft adaptation strategies for these high-altitude communities.

 

The “rights of nature” is a new concept: that nature possesses fundamental rights, just as humans do. It derives from an old concept rooted in traditional societies that saw themselves as part of nature, not distinct from it. Ancient India, including people who lived at the time of the Rig Veda, were nature worshippers. The Rig Veda is said to have been compiled in the Bronze Age, between 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. The Rig Vedic communities revered several deities: personifications of the elements of nature like fire, water, sky and earth, and they treated the environment as a sacred whole. The chief deity was Agni (fire), and others like Indra (lightning/rain), Varuna (water) and Prithvi (earth). India’s ancient seers believed the universe was governed by a moral law: living in harmony with nature and maintaining its ecological balance was essential for fulfilling one’s “dharma”

Like ancient Indians, many other primeval people were nature worshippers too. These included the Shinto community in Japan, Celtic and Germanic tribes, Mayans and Aztec people, Native Americans and ancient Greeks and Romans. Nature held primacy in these civilisations. This changed in later years and far from being worshipped, Nature became a resource to be exploited for financial gain, with little regard for its survival and sanctity. As humans degraded nature and systematically destroyed it, the unpleasant and threatening manifestations of this destruction became evident today.

A hallmark of our era is destruction of ecosystems, disruption of biospheres, polluted rivers, biodiversity loss and species extinction. Instead of conserving Nature, that has nurtured us for millennia, we appear hell-bent on destroying it. We have already breached seven of nine critical planetary boundaries and pushed the planet into uncharted territory: ecosystems are devastated and the weather has become completely unstable. Freshwater in all forms, like surface water, groundwater, even soil moisture, is being depleted at unsustainable rates due to overexploitation. In this backdrop of an utterly ravaged nature, the concept of the Rights of Nature took shape as an attempt to salvage what one could to ensure the continued survival of the human race. History There is a Rights of Nature movement in many nations seeking systemic change in how we treat nature. This movement is trying to develop fresh concepts in the legal system to make it work for the protection of the environment instead of enabling the rights of certain people to exploit the environment. Most Rights of Nature legal precedent is very recent, having emerged in just the last few years as a direct response to the failure of modern environmental law to adequately address the escalating ecological crisis.

The Rights of Nature approach attempts a transformation in the way the status of nature is upheld in society. It says Nature possesses its own rights and can’t be treated merely as human property. Nature’s rights include the right to exist and to thrive, and most important, the right to restoration. Since the Rights of Nature accords it legal standing, it can be directly defended in a court of law. Ultimately, for these rights to be successfully implemented, humans must act as guardians or stewards of the natural world. Rivers have understandably become a key focus in the Rights of Nature movement, since river systems are under extreme pressure everywhere. Many of the world’s rivers suffer from extreme over-exploitation, bringing about fundamental changes in riverine ecosystems, habitats and watersheds. With its established history of worshipping nature, especially its rivers, India could have led the global trend to demand the Rights of Nature by personal example and enlightened legislation. But it failed to do so because of a Supreme Court intervention in a pioneering attempt by the Uttarakhand high court. 

The Uttarakhand case: In 2014, a Haridwar resident, Mohammad Salim, filed a PIL on illegal construction, mining, and stone-crushing on the banks of the Ganga. In response, the Uttarakhand high court ruled in 2017 that rivers were in danger of losing their existence and extended to them “all corresponding rights, duties, and liabilities of a living person”. This led to declaring the Ganga and Yamuna rivers as “Living Legal Entities”. 

This historic legal breakthrough to establish that Nature had rights was, however, short-lived. In 2017 the Supreme Court stayed the high court order, in a sense saying that India’s two most important rivers, the Ganga and the Yamuna, cannot be viewed as “Living Entities”. The stay came in response to an appeal by the Uttarakhand government that making the state solely accountable for the upkeep of rivers spanning multiple states was impractical and required Central government intervention. This put paid to a far-sighted legal ruling that could have gone a long way to uphold the rights of rivers and to protect them from pollution and degradation. 

While the India case lies stalled, other countries have moved forward to provide legal protection to rivers by granting them legal personhood or inherent rights. Ecuador in 2008 became the first country to formally embed the Rights of Nature, including rivers and ecosystems, into its constitution, allowing citizens to legally defend the environment. New Zealand had enacted legislation in 2014 granting the Whanganui River legal personhood, giving it all the rights, duties, and liabilities of a legal person. In Colombia, the Atrato River was recognised as a legal entity in 2016, possessing rights to protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration. In a historic ruling in 2019, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh recognised all rivers in the country as legal persons and appointed the National River Conservation Commission as their legal guardian. Finally, in Canada, the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and the regional municipality passed resolutions in 2021 giving the Magpie River legal personhood, granting it rights to flow and be free from pollution. 

https://www.asianage.com/opinion/columnists/it-might-be-time-to-grant-legal-rights-to-nature-1969115

 📌 WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY 2026: WHAT EXACTLY ARE WE CELEBRATING?

Today is WorldEnvironmentDay. A day for speeches, hashtags, photo-ops with saplings, solemn pledges and carefully crafted messages about our love for nature.

But forgive me for asking - what exactly are we celebrating?

The environment that we are systematically destroying? The forests we are cutting down for mining? The rivers we are poisoning with industrial waste and sewage? The mountains we are blasting in the name of infrastructure development? The biodiversity we are driving to extinction? Or the tribal communities we are uprooting from lands they have protected for

generations?

Nothing captures the hypocrisy of this annual ritual better than what is happening in the Hasdeo Forests of Chhattisgarh, one of India’s richest forest ecosystems, often called the 'Lungs of Central India'.

I’m not against generating energy or against development, but the question is why the easiest solution always seems to be sacrificing forests, biodiversity and indigenous rights.

Year after year, governments assure us that environmental protection is a priority. Prime Ministers and assorted others speak passionately about climate change, sustainability and green growth. Yet on the ground, forests continue to disappear under excavators and mining clearances.

World Environment Day has increasingly become an exercise in collective self-congratulation and is reduced to mere tokenism that allows governments, corporations and even citizens to feel virtuous for a day while the destruction continues uninterrupted for the remaining 364.

For decades, the scientists, environmentalists, and everyone concerned have been warning that the climate crisis is no longer a future threat. It has already entered our homes: the heatwaves, floods, droughts, crop failures and disappearing water sources are real-life

manifestations.

I am pained to say that while leaders plant ceremonial saplings and deliver speeches on sustainability, an estimated 5 lac trees are proposed to be slaughtered in Hasdeo forests; over 15000 Adivasi families will be impacted, whose lives depend on these forests for their livelihoods, for their very survival. Let that sink in. If this is environmental protection, what does environmental destruction look like?

This year’s heat alarm went off with the mercury touching 48.2°C in Banda in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh. This weather record must be treated as a shrill warning of dire things to come if we even now refuse to acknowledge that the consequences of global warning are going to border on catastrophic. And we better put adaptation strategies in place NOW.  

Schools shutting at 10 a.m., deserted streets, collapsing livelihoods, and the poor struggling to survive outdoors are no longer isolated episodes. They are signs of the widespread climate catastrophe that our country has entered without preparation, without safeguards, and worst of all, without seriousness. The May 2026 report on Banda’s extraordinary heatwave wasn’t just a weather report of a town; it is the evidence of decades of ecological neglect.

Bundelkhand has always been ecologically fragile, but decades of environmental degradation have pushed the region towards collapse. Deforestation, shrinking water bodies, relentless groundwater extraction, destruction of traditional tanks and ponds, declining tree cover and unsustainable agricultural practices have combined with global warming to create lethal conditions. Concrete expansion without ecological planning has intensified local heat islands. Rivers are drying earlier, soils are losing moisture-retaining capacity, and farming systems have become increasingly vulnerable. Heatwaves that were once occasional are now prolonged, harsher and more frequent.

This is exactly how climate change enters and affects human life; not dramatically in a single moment, but steadily, silently and then suddenly all at once. For years, climate change remained confined to policy seminars, global summits and bureaucratic reports. It was discussed in air-conditioned conference halls as if it were a distant future concern. That illusion no longer survives. Climate change is now inside our homes, affecting our health, livelihoods, food systems and daily survival. The poor laborer working outdoors, the farmer watching crops shrivel, the child unable to attend school because of unbearable heat, the elderly struggling through sleepless nights without cooling, are the real faces of global warming.

Extreme heat is not just uncomfortable, it is deadly. It accelerates water scarcity, destroys crops, reduces labour productivity, worsens malnutrition, and increases disease burdens. Urban centres become furnaces because trees have disappeared and wetlands have been buried under the concrete of development projects. Rural distress intensifies as rainfall becomes erratic and farming turns uncertain. Climate change is now directly linked to food insecurity, indebtedness and migration.

The science behind this crisis has been understood for years. What has been missing is political urgency and the failure to acknowledge ecological wisdom. Sustained work by scientists over decades has tried to draw attention to the fact that tampering with the ecological foundations of food and livelihood security will spell disaster. Repeated warnings were issued about the dangers of destroying biodiversity, replacing resilient local farming systems with monocultures, eroding traditional seed diversity and neglecting community- based natural resource management. We have known since long that bio resources and genetic diversity are not academic concepts but survival tools in an age of climatic uncertainty. But we have not acted.

Despite plenty of evidence that climate shocks would hit the poor the hardest because their survival is directly tied to natural resources — land, forests, water and biodiversity, development policies continued to privilege short-term gains over ecological stability. Rivers were treated as engineering projects, forests as real estate, and agriculture as an industrial input-output exercise divorced from nature.

And here we see the results unfolding before our eyes. Banda is not an exception, it is a warning about other events that are underway. Similar conditions are emerging across large parts of India; from Himalayan regions witnessing glacial instability to coastal belts facing cyclones and salinity intrusion; from drought-prone interiors to cities collapsing under extreme heat. We see that unabated construction is rampant in mountain states like

Himachal and Uttarakhand despite nature’s constant warnings. The climate crisis has moved from planning and prediction to lived reality today. The tragedy is that even now, responses remain fragmented and cosmetic. Responses are devoid of any ecological understanding We have plantation drives with abysmal survival rates of what was planted, infrastructure expansion without environmental safeguards, and climate rhetoric devoid of meaningful applicability. This will will not address the magnitude of the crisis we are facing. What is needed is a fundamental shift in planning the future, helping forests to regenerate, biodiversity conservation , ecological restoration, water security and climate-resilient agriculture rooted in local knowledge systems, these are the things we need.

Unfortunately, it appears that those responsible for shaping policy are still not listening with the seriousness the crisis demands. Nature’s warning signals have become impossible to ignore. The question is whether society and governments will act before ecological breakdown becomes irreversible. Banda’s unbearable heat is not just a temperature statistic; it is the sound of an ecological alarm bell ringing across India. What is truly heart breaking is that those least responsible for the crisis are paying the heaviest price.

https://open.substack.com/pub/sumansahai/p/48-degrees-c-in-banda-up-is-a-warning?r=6oq097&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

 📌 Forests taken away from the guardianship of forest dwellers.

In India as in other parts of the developing world, many communities call the forests their home and have lived there over generations. This community of forest dwellers have traditionally derived their livelihoods from the forest which has included forest produce and agriculture.

Colonial policies which used the forest as a timber resource have historically been antagonistic to forest dwellers. Later national policies declaring certain parts of the forest as protected areas, national parks and conservation zones put further pressure on forest dwelling communities forcing displacement and marginalization.

To undo these gross violations of the rights of forest communities, the Government of India enacted the Forest Rights Act in 2006. This law recognized the rights of forest communities to live on and cultivate ancestral forest land. It also gave them legal rights to collect and use Non Timber Forest Produce (NTFP) and also sell these collections. In recognition of their role in conserving the forest, The Forest Rights Act (FRA) granted forest dwellers the right to protect and manage community forest resources. In this way, the FRA made tribal communities the legal custodians of India’s most ecologically significant landscapes. But this did not last long.

In 2023, the government brought an amendment to the largely positive Forest Conservation Act 1980 which militates directly against the earlier rights granted to forest dwellers under the FRA 2006. The Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023 has removed the mandatory clause that the Gram Sabha had to give its consent before any forest land could be diverted. This was the one institutional mechanism through which forest communities could exercise binding authority over their forests. By the treacherous amendment of 2023 amendment, this right was taken away, opening the forest to rampant exploitation.

https://theindiantribal.com/2026/05/15/weakening-tribal-forest-rights-could-undermine-indias-climate-commitments-and-carbon-sink-targets/

THE FRACTURED MOUNTAIN/ ATLEAST THE TEHRI DAM STILL STANDS

Suman Sahai

Many of us who live and work in Uttarakhand have seen this disaster coming. Environmental groups have tried, unsuccessfully, to warn of the coming tragedy but no one was listening. Iam not sure they are listening now either. Their eyes glazed over with the prospect of billions to be made from the rape of the Himalayas and the destruction of the livelihoods of the mountain people, the builders, contractors and their partners in crime in Dehradun and Delhi are not deterred by this blip of human and environmental catastrophe .

Those in Delhi can take solace in the fact that the Tehri dam , that swollen grenade waiting to burst its casing, is still standing. It may not be standing in its quiet corner for very long  in the youngest, most fragile mountain of the world,  if the  relentless assault on the Himalayas  continues. The fractured rocks of this young and still emerging mountain range, considered exceedingly fragile and unstable by geologists, will not be able to withstand  the instability caused by repeated blasting of the mountains to make roads, resorts and installations. The day the Tehri  dam collapses, the waters, it is anticipated, will reach Delhi, totally submerging Haridwar and Rishikesh  and sweeping aside everything  in its path.

A friend described a  trip to Uttarkashi  where they had gone to make a collection of botanical specimens last year . As they rattled along in their government issue jeep,  they heard a rumbling, then sounds like thunder claps and in seconds a river of rocks and stones poured down the hillside. They were in the way and it was because the driver practically  stood on the brakes that the jeep stopped a whisker short. What shook the travellers was the speed and velocity with which huge boulders and rocks came down. It was the speed with which the rocks and slush poured into Kedarnath this time  that left no time for escape.

 The contractor who had nearly killed this team of scientists came running to apologise.  He admitted that they would be blasting at several  sites and was shaken enough to confess that no safety norms were adhered to,  to cut costs. He added that by the time he had greased palms from top to bottom, to get the contract, his operating budget was considerably reduced and if he did not cut corners, he could not complete the work and make his (substantial) profit . We know this modus  from many other schemes and projects where bridges and houses collapse, roads get washed away and people lose their lives.  In this grotesque  business scheme where an unscrupulous nexus of the ungodly rake in milions , loss of human lives and property is par for the course.

Tubewells are being dug through the fragile geological layers in Uttarakhand  in perversely designed programs to provide drinking water. The current administration has refused to listen to geologists who have warned that fracturing layers of  rock , going down several hundred feet in this manner  was a recipe for disaster since the drilling would destabilize the formations and cause instability.

I am filled with apprehension  when I read that Rs 1000 crore have been allocated for the rehabilitation of Uttarakhand and appeals have been sent out in the name of the Chief minister’s Fund, the Prime Minister’s Fund  and so forth. The people of this country have begun to pour in contributions to help the people of Uttarakhand  rebuild their lives. On the other hand, speculation is already on about how much of the 1000 crore grant  will be siphoned off along the chain of bureaucrats , politicians and their partners in crime, with estimates  going  up to 800 to 900 crores!  Some fat cats are going to get fatter and the lives of the poor mountain people will not improve. Some roads  will be patched up to get washed away next monsoon, some families will get a tenth of their entitlement to rebuild  a room or two in their houses. Fake registers will be filled up to show relief materials have been delivered to ‘beneficiaries- that dreadful word. And the sleazy and powerful in India will continue to build empires on the misery  of the poor.