AGEING MOUNTAINS | The Toll of Youth Migration on the Elderly

Kuldeep, a young man in Uttarakhand state, is one among countless individuals who have abandoned their native villages, and traditional farming, to migrate to big cities in search of employment. A few kilometres away, an elderly couple, Yashoda Devi and Ramesh Chand, bear witness to this mass migration, living alone in their now desolate village.

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SUBMERGED | A Result of Uttarakhand’s Development Projects

Sucheta Tomar, a farmer and housewife in Uttarakhand state's Lohari village, is one of the many residents who lost their ancestral homes due to a hydropower project by the state government. Their home submerged in flood water, Sucheta and her husband now live in a classroom of an abandoned school.

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UNHEARD ECHOES

Duka Devi is nearly 100 years old but her activist spirit appears to be as youthful as it must have been during the ?Chipko? movement she was part of decades ago. In that agitation in Raini village in Uttarakhand state?s Chamoli district in the 1970s, women from the Bhotia indigenous community hugged trees and offered to be shot by loggers, successfully preventing fell of trees.

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PAHADIN | How Women keep The Mountain Inhabited

Lakshmi Gauniyal's day starts at dawn and she rests only after dusk. She does all the work, from preparing meals to cutting wood from trees to sowing seeds in their agricultural field and earning money from labour under the government's social security measure MNREGA. Had it not been for women like Lakshmi, families would have been compelled to migrate away from their villages in Uttarakhand state's mountainous Pauri Garhwal district.

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LEOPARD IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

Sarveshwar Prasad?s family is among the very few people in his village in northern India?s Uttarakhand state who have not migrated away out of fear of leopards. These wild cats are often seen wandering in residential areas in the state?s Pauri Garhwal district and sometimes mauling humans, even to death.

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WHY ARE MINORITIES ATTACKED IN INDIA

About 200 people barged into a church in Roorkee city’s Solanipuram area in Uttarakhand state on Oct. 3, vandalised its property and beat up Christians, including women. When the Christians filed a police plaint, three people lodged a counter complaint alleging that workers of the church …

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