News stories by Keya Acharya

ALAPPUZHA, (India), Mar 06 (IPS) - Farming, tourism, poor fishing practices along with misdirected policies are muddying the famous backwaters of Kerala, one of India's best known holiday destinations. Nowhere is this misuse more visible than in and around the 95-km-long Vembanad Lake.

NAPLES, Dic 16 (IPS) - The beauty of the Bay of Naples under a setting sun, the romance of Sorrento and the scenic splendour of the Amalfi coastline pull thousands of visitors to southern Italy. But the region is also home to an ugly truth.

RAIPUR, India, Nov 23 (IPS) - Deep in the forests of central India live the Gond tribals, an almost forgotten lot, neglected as much by the state as by mainstream media. Many cannot read or write. But thanks to a new technology, and the rapid spread of mobile phones through India, they are now picking up their cell phone and making their voice heard.

BANGALORE, India, Sep 18 (IPS) - In spite of India's much-publicised national renewable energy policy as part of its international commitments to reduce carbon emissions, its Mid Day Meal (MDM) Scheme, the world's largest school lunch programme, has no energy conservation or even a fuel policy in its workings.

WARANGAL, India, Nov 22 (IPS) - In a country notorious for the inability to deal with the waste it generates, municipal officials in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh are now resorting to making waste management a competitive sport, in their bid to cajole the entire nation to clean up.

HYDERABAD, India, Oct 17 (IPS) - India’s National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) is actively promoting decentralised grassroots livelihoods as the best way to  conserve biodiversity as mandated by the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit sharing (ABS).

BUNDELKHAND, India, Aug 21 (IPS) - Narrow, cobblestoned lanes separate the rows of mud houses with cool interiors and mud-smoothened patios, some with goats tethered to the wooden posts. This is Tajpura village, deep in this water-stressed, drought-prone region of northern India.  

BANGALORE, Aug 01 (IPS) - Almitra Patel, a civil engineer by qualification, says she was first alerted to India’s huge problem of inadequate waste disposal when she noticed that the frogs in the marshlands near her farmhouse, on the city’s outskirts, had stopped croaking.

A group of women working in a tree-shaded nursery in this arid part of southern Tamil Nadu state is helping to manage India’s very first biomass energy plantation.

Standing on a patch of arid, degraded land, 100 km from southern Bangalore city, Ramapal, member of the ‘gram panchayat’ (local village administration), points to a roughly-dug canal feeding a narrow belt of green cultivation.