Sanskrita B

Instances of encounters that result in human or elephant fatalities are all too common. In 2020, in Kerala, a pregnant wild elephant allegedly died after she was given a pineapple stuffed with firecrackers.

Resources are sparse at this refugee camp in Silchar but women from Manipur who have sheltered here with their families do not want to return home yet.

Dipa Saikia, a community health worker in Assam, northeast India, narrates a few harrowing details of trying to provide care during the South Asian monsoons. Every summer, humid winds rush onto the Indian subcontinent and hit the Himalayas, which forces the winds to rise; reaching the upper atmosphere, their temperature drops, causing rainfall. In Assam, June, July and August each bring a foot of rain in a typical year. “Monsoons are the worst time for us,” Saikia says.
The most diffi...

On a muggy June afternoon in the remote village of Pohumora in northeastern India, Anjana Taye haunches on the mud floor of her home and carefully pours into two bowls the cloudy fermented rice drink known as apong, a staple of the indigenous Mising community.

The rice in the apong was once abundant in the lush green Lakhimpur district of the Indian state of Assam, where indigenous communities have relied for centuries on the Brahmaputra River for their way of life. With damming and construct...

Mumbai and Guwahati: September 9, 2017 had started like any other Saturday for Shehnaz Singh. Within hours, her life had been upended.
The 48 year old hawker had set up her cut fruits stall near the Bandstand promenade in Mumbai’s Bandra area, home to several Bollywood stars. The 1.2-km walkway is popular among joggers, college students, young couples and families and business is usually brisk in the mornings for Singh.
Suddenly workers of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) along wi...

For a poem she posted on Facebook in 2022, Assam teen Barshashree Buragohain was arrested and jailed for two months under India’s draconian anti-terror law, widely used against protestors or dissidents, with a conviction rate of 2.8%. The police called her post ‘anti-national’ and an implicit endorsement of a banned insurgent outfit. The law’s chilling effect is apparent. Buragohain, now 20, studies maths, minds what she posts, and wants to be a bureaucrat.

Guwahati: “Swadhin xurujor dixe ako...

One December afternoon, Sunita Doley sat outside her house, recalling several instances when floods had wreaked havoc in the village she grew up in. She recollects a specific incident from 2021. “There was knee-deep to neck-deep water that year,” Doley says. A woman from Doley’s village was in an advanced stage of her pregnancy. Community health officers were informed about her condition but there was no chance of an ambulance reaching as the village was cut off due to the floods.

Not wasting...

Dhemaji/Guwahati: As the eldest child, Gomeshwar Kardong of Medhi Pamua village in Assam’s Dhemaji district is responsible for providing for his family. “I have been working since I was very young, as I had to provide for my mother and younger brother,” Kardong, 25, who lost his father when he was six years old, told IndiaSpend.
But, Kardong says, it is now risky for farmers like him to invest their time and effort in paddy farming, once the mainstay of their livelihood, because every year fl...

The Guwahati High Court criticised charges of rape and child sexual abuse against many of more than 3,000 men arrested in Assam in less than two weeks for marrying underage women. The chief minister’s ‘war’ on child marriage, focusses on marginalised minorities, particularly Muslims and devastates families. Mothers with young children are without support, as husbands and fathers are jailed. The solution to child marriage, national experience shows, lies in schools, healthcare and female emanc...

To adapt and reduce disaster risk, the indigenous Mising community in Assam constructs and lives in traditional flood-resilient houses called chang ghors that are perched above the ground on bamboo stilts.
Assam’s Dhemaji district which borders Arunachal Pradesh is one of India’s most flood-prone areas. Villages along the banks of the river Brahmaputra are inhabited mostly by the indigenous Mising community who live with the fear of losing their property and livestock every year. Besides, the...

Kohima/Chümoukedima/Dimapur/Guwahati: Every morning, 42-year-old Loni Yalie neatly places vegetables, fruits, dry fish and a variety of edible worms at a spot in the Local Ground area in Nagaland's capital Kohima. After the death of her husband, Yalie has been the sole breadwinner for her three school-going children. "I don't know how to read and write," Yalie, who belongs to the indigenous Lotha tribe, told IndiaSpend. "So, I couldn't have done any other job apart from street vending even if...

Demographic change in one small state is used as a red flag in its giant neighbour, Assam. But the history of Tripura and its people is much more than that.
High and hectic drama was a feature of Indian life in the months leading up to independence, and every corner of the subcontinent threw up its own variation on the theme. In the princely state of Tripura, tucked into the northeastern wing of the peninsula, the ruler Bir Bikram Kishore Manikya came to the decision to join the Indian Union ...

Rickshaw puller Asmat Ali and construction worker Rafik Kazi were asked by the Assam government to prove their citizenship in quasi judicial bodies called foreigners’ tribunals. With the help of Guwahati-based lawyers who fought their cases pro bono, Ali and Kazi were declared Indians. Several hundreds still fight to prove their identities.

Mangaldai & Barpeta (Assam): On a humid September day, dressed in a loose, white shirt and worn trousers, 48-year-old Asmat Ali waited for the 3 pm boat t...

These magnificent sculptures are shrouded in mystery.
Under British rule in India, Tripura was a princely state ruled by the kings of the Manikya dynasty. Following India’s independence in 1947, Tripura merged with the country in 1949 and became a full-fledged state in 1971. Today, India’s third smallest state borders Bangladesh to its north, south, and west, and the Indian states of Assam and Mizoram to the east.
As a vacation destination, Tripura has not quite picked up or is pretty far off...

While cities expand rapidly, drainage systems fail to be developed accordingly, leading to prolonged flooding during intense rainfall.
The National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) in New Delhi insists on facilitating groundwater recharge to store excess flood water.
The Assam State Action Plan 2.0, which is pending approval, focuses on mainstreaming climate action into urban infrastructure, governance and policy.
“There was water till my waist,” recalls Tarun Rajkhowa, a 70-year-old residen...