Stories written by Keya Acharya
A journalist with over 20 years of experience in in-depth writing and researching environment and development issues in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. Keya has travelled widely, covering assignments in various areas of the world. Her research has included climate change, urban solid waste management, rural alternative energy systems, implementation of laws on industrial hazardous wastes, human rights, ecotourism, wildlife issues, transgenic cotton, corruption and environment, population and gender, e-governance, agribiotech and forests and encroachments, among other topics.
Keya is vice chair of the Forum of Environmental Journalists of India, and has organised several media-training workshops, convened international media meetings and undertaken media study tours.
Keya has won several research and media fellowships and is the recipient of the Press Institute’s award for Excellence in Human Development Reporting; the Prem Bhatia Award for Environmental Reporting, and the Green Globe Foundation award for Outstanding Media Contribution by a Media Individual.
Keya has also conducted development journalism studies as visiting faculty, chaired media and international conference panels, and edited ‘The Green Pen’, an anthology of essays on environmental journalism, the first of its kind in South Asia, featuring the region's most prominent and respected environmental journalists.
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Ranjini Gupta who works with the urban development department located in the heart of this bustling city snacks occasionally at the street food stalls nearby unmindful of food safety concerns.
Over 37.7 million people in India are affected by water-borne diseases due to contaminated drinking water supply and an estimated 1.5 million children die of diarrhoea each year, according to newly available statistics.
An initiative in India to introduce environmental conservation into village administration is making good headway in this rural district some 120 km from Bangalore, capital of southern Karnataka state.
Walking through morning sunlight streaming through tall teak trees, A.K. Singh deputy conservator of forests, points out the ‘core, critical tiger habitat’ in the heart of this sprawling national park.
Agricultural non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in India and elsewhere are criticising the newly-opened Global Seed Vault (GSV) at Svalbard in Norway as fundamentally unjust in its objectives.
Aspiring community radio operators from various parts of the country are complaining of long delays, frustration and bureaucratic red tape in obtaining licenses to run radio stations.
Environmentalists are reviving a plan to conserve the vast hilly, forested region running parallel to the west coast of peninsular India (western ghats), recognised as a global biodiversity hotspot.
Air pollution levels monitored by southern Karnataka state’s pollution control board (KSPCB) in this imploding southern Indian city - among Asia’s fastest-growing with an official population of 6.8 million people - have risen alarmingly over the last five years.
The voluptuous heroine playing a coy hide-and-seek game of love around a tree in Indian cinema has produced derisive scoffs from Western audiences and sophisticated film buffs at home and abroad.
A small but successful solar energy company involved in rural electrification in India is complaining that the Kyoto Protocol’s clean development mechanism (CDM) has been of no practical use to it.
Lack of regulation, accountability, low costs of operation and wide availability of target participants are reasons why multinational drug companies, researchers and institutions are increasingly basing their clinical trials in India.
The magical trill of the Nilgiri Whistling Thrush deep in the jungles of this remote southern Indian wildlife sanctuary is no comfort to its nearly 2,000 Soliga aboriginal tribal families.
A variation of the age-old concept of composting household garbage, using cheap earthen pots, is turning into a runaway success in this fast-expanding metropolis of seven million people.
Activist groups campaigning for affordable drugs will continue their boycott campaign against Swiss pharma major Novartis AG, whose controversial petition arguing that Indian patent laws violated World Trade Organisation (WTO) provisions was rejected by the Madras High Court in southern Chennai city.
Intellectuals in this famous university town founded by nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore, 210 km from Kolkata, have taken the state government to court for defacing its unique cultural and environmental heritage in the name of development.
Scientists at the prestigious Indian Institute of Science (IISc) based in this southern Indian city say that field studies of climate change impacts in India are currently non-existent, with no attention being given to them.
A group of 25 leaders of the Soliga tribe in the isolated Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple Wildlife Sanctuary in the hills of this southern Indian state sit in a semi-circle, discussing matters of concern to them.
Five years after India enacted a seemingly pioneering, conservation-oriented law to preserve the country’s amazing diversity of flora and fauna, the Act remains bogged down by widespread protests from local communities, while civic groups protest the dilution of related environmental laws.
A stream of protests has hit India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) for sanctioning municipal waste-to-energy (MWTE) projects that are collapsing under an avalanche of incombustible wastes.