India has no single word for what happens when a community embroiders a peacock onto a shawl, paints a tiger onto a temple wall, or weaves a blackbuck into a carpet — and has been doing so for five centuries.
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India’s eastern coastline and its island territories are, in documentary terms, some of the most ecologically significant and most overlooked landscapes in the country.
A male hoolock gibbon has used an artificial canopy bridge over a railway line in Assam — the first documented instance anywhere in the world of a gibbon crossing a railway canopy structure. Meanwhile, 22 days after four cheetah cubs were found dead at Kuno, the post-mortem findings remain unpublished.
Seven Asiatic lions have died in Gujarat’s Gir landscape in ten days. Five tigers and their cubs died in Madhya Pradesh’s Kanha from CDV. India’s big cats are facing disease pressure on two fronts simultaneously — and in both cases, the warnings have been on record for years.
The nilgai is India’s largest antelope, one of its most widely distributed large mammals, and possibly its most politically contested. In Bihar it is protected by religious sentiment. In Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh it has been declared vermin. The same animal, under the same law, treated in entirely opposite ways depending on where it stands.
Two separate mining proposals in Chandrapur district, Maharashtra — one for iron ore, one for coal — are moving through India’s wildlife clearance system. Both affect forest land in the Brahmapuri division, a corridor that connects Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve with forests across Gadchiroli, Nawegaon-Nagzira, and Chhattisgarh. Here is what the facts say.
Karnataka has ended open-vehicle wildlife safaris across all its tiger reserves and wildlife sanctuaries. The announcement, made by Forest Minister Eshwar Khandre, is the latest in a series of safety measures following two years of escalating leopard and tiger attacks on visitors and forest-fringe communities.
There are 106 national parks in India. For a first-timer, the choice is not just about which animal you want to see — it’s about which landscape will make you fall in love with Indian wildlife. Here are five parks that do exactly that.
India’s biodiversity does not sort itself neatly by species. It sorts itself by landscape.
A tiger found dead in Goa with teeth and claws missing. A leopard strangled in a wire snare in Odisha. A lion cub killed on a Gujarat highway. An elephant shot and mutilated at the Assam–Meghalaya border. And another elephant dead from a suspected Maoist IED in Jharkhand’s Saranda forest. Five incidents, five species, one fortnight.