Ravleen kaur

India's mint farmers now face stiff competition from synthetic menthol, coupled with rising production costs and high taxes. These challenges are only exacerbated by climate change, which is making harvests less reliable.

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Upturned harvest
Afrequent traveller to rural parts of northern India will find something odd about the roadside sights on a ride from Jaipur to Jobner, especially during late March.
On the fields flanking the nearly 50-km stretch, bundles of freshly cut wheat signal the harvest season. But instead of the golden ears swishing joyfully in the air, one sees a jumble of thread-like roots.
“The grains are actually hidden in the shade of stems,” Nanu Ram Khan daliya who lives in Pach...

An increase in the consumption of tender coconut and its products is leading to an increase in tender coconut husk in landfill sites and on road corners.
Solid waste management experts say that there are technologies to recycle tender coconut husk into value added products, but the lack of source segregation makes their retrieval difficult.

Nurdles, the tiny plastic pellets used as feedstock for making plastic products, are becoming dangerous as they spill into land and waterways during transportation. Animals mistake nurdles for food, causing fatalities while putting plastic into the food chain.
While India has been focusing heavily on ‘managing’ plastic waste, such as beach clean-up drives, and has also been working on a Marine Litter Policy since 2018, activists argue that plastic is not just a litter problem, as the government wants to project.

Gujarat produces 80% of India’s salt. Most of it is produced in coastal areas which are impacted by unpredictable rainfall and cyclones.
As production in coastal salt works has reduced, and demand for edible and industrial salt as well as exports has increased, prices have gone up.
Long-standing salt producers say that an active government authority should regulate the salt industry as it is an essential commodity.

With a rising demand for vehicles, there has been a corresponding increase in the use of tyres leading to more waste tyres.
Scrap tyre comes under the category of hazardous waste owing to its potential to cause fires and resultant toxic emissions in air and water.
The government introduced extended producers’ responsibility for waste tyres in 2022 but data shows that the tyre production industry has not started complying yet.

Surat’s textile industry is improving its manufacturing processes with efficient use of coal, electricity and water and by adopting renewable energy, to deal with the impacts of climate change and also be eco-friendly.
While liquid effluents are being dealt with by following good practices, the use of fossil fuels and the generation of petrochemical-based fabric waste, still remain problems.
Workers involved in steam-based operations are often exposed to high temperatures, which become too intense during summers.

The brackish water ecology of the Little Rann of Kutch, is made up of a mix of seawater, river run-off and rainwater, which makes it an ideal nursery ground for ginger prawns.
However, this hydrological regime where ginger prawn thrives is broken by the expansion of marine salt works and reduced freshwater runoff from rivers.
Rann Sarovar, a proposed freshwater lake in the Little Rann of Kutch, would, if approved, deal a final blow to this small-scale fishery.

Gujarat’s Little Rann of Kutch supports two seasonal livelihoods, prawn fisheries and inland salt farming.
The region is the largest nursery ground of the ginger prawn species endemic to the Gulf of Kutch and almost 50,000 fishers on foot earn an income from fishing it juvenile.
After the fishing season is when salt production from sub-soil brine takes place. However, the expansion of salt works is impacting prawn fisheries which is on the decline.

The forest department of Gujarat has officially acknowledged the role of Agariyas, the salt workers of the Little Rann of Kutch, in wildlife conservation, particularly of the wild ass that is predominantly found in the region.
Agariyas have traditionally been making salt from underground brine in the Little Rann of Kutch. The latest acknowledgment gives the Agariyas official access to land and in turn, access to bank finance and markets. But legal recognition of their traditional rights, by rights settlement, is still awaited.

Indian airports are rapidly shifting to solar energy, given their massive energy requirement and carbon emissions. A significant safety concern in the airport solarisation move is ‘glare’ or reflection of the sun from solar panels that can cause flash blindness. The top glass surface of solar panels can reflect light, causing discomfort, retinal burn, veiling and after-image effects. India does not have its own regulation on glare assessment. So, the simulation software designed for other countries’ regulations are used for glare analysis.

Andhra Pradesh’s community managed natural farming project is a gamechanger that covers 850,000 farmers who grow multiple crops on small landholdings without using any chemical fertilisers or pesticides.

A first person article about how field reporting assignments, meeting people living starkly different lives are rare opportunities for individual growth.

A solar canal is a canal fitted with solar panels, increasing their efficiency, and reducing evaporation and land usage. But the high cost of mounting the structures is a discouraging factor.