Grasslands: The Hidden Life

The article explores the microbial diversity across India’s main grassland ecosystems, ranging from the Banni and Terai to the Alpine Bugyals and Shola grasslands, urging visualization of soil health as connected to the global “One Health” framework.

The FRA promise

Two decades after the Forest Rights Act became law, the record is uneven. While the law offers a democratic framework for forest governance, its transformative potential is unrealised due to weak implementation and resistance from bureaucrats

The governance, rights face-off

Between paper and forest floor, an entrenched bureaucracy, aided by an indifferent political class, has managed to subvert the FRA’s most radical promise of genuinely democratic, grassroots governance of forests.

Why the FRA matters in Arunachal

Arunachal Pradesh’s forests, covering 80 per cent of its area, remain inseparable from the ancestral homeland of the indigenous Scheduled Tribes, who account for two-thirds of the State’s population. Every activity linked to land—cultural, material, and commercial—is, in one way or another, linked to forests. Even at first glance, the Forest Rights Act (FRA) would […]