Migration

Phaguni Ho hails from East Singhbhum district in Jharkhand. Come March, Phaguni’s husband will migrate to Chennai to work as a daily wager at a construction site. Unable to handle the small farm in Singhbhum alone, she has given it on lease to another farmer. “I have to look after my four children and livestock.

Women in Salmora area of Majuli, the world’s largest riverine island and India’s first island district, practise their traditional form of pottery--the one that does not use a wheel but is hand beaten to shape and uses a viscid kind of clay. As the Brahmaputra eats away huge swathes of land year after year, the clay that these potters use is being taken away by the river. 

It had been a chaotic morning. With so many people bustling around the small house, Avani was looking forward to celebrating her only son's second birthday. Graciously, her husband agreed to have the celebration at Avani’s mother’s place this time. Her mother made all the arrangements for the pooja and prasadam while Avani was to take care of the guests.

Sexagenarian Radha Madhavan's (name changed) voice carries a shade of gloom even as she rationalises her children's decision to leave their parental home for good. “My husband and I totally understand it. Do they not have a point when they say they do not wish to return to this wretched island, considering their own families’ safety?

In what is considered the worst flood in a decade, the flood in Assam this year has swept over 2,800 villages away and submerged more than two lakh hectares of crop. More than 26 lakh people have been affected in 28 out of 34 districts of the state.

Champa Devi has been working as a sharecropper on a two-acre farm at Nilothi village in west Delhi. Until a few years ago, the water she used for irrigation came from the Najafgarh drain that empties into the Yamuna river. This form of cultivation using waste water was a norm in the area till sometime ago.

Small islands in southern Kerala lakes sinking

Dhanmaniya Devi had never tasted a ‘good’ fish. “All we had during my childhood were the small varieties which come to rivers during monsoon. They are rarely seen now,” says the 65-year-old villager in Sildag of Palamau district in Jharkhand. This is why when her family reared the commercial variety fish last year, she was delighted.

Vikram Patel, a 71-year-old farmer in Chidavad village of Dewas district in Madhya Pradesh is one of the first farmers to have embraced the idea of farm ponds to increase the groundwater level in his farm.

Kishan Yadav has a lot in common with the popular flute-playing god whose namesake he is. They share a name, a caste, a profession, and the land they live on.