Mohit Mudliar Studying sea turtle biology is a difficult task due to sea turtles’ way of life. Since these animals take a long time to attain sexual maturity and spend most of their lives at sea, knowledge of their life is scarce. These turtles appear on the shore only for nesting or when they are…
Deepika Sharma Since the 1980s, tourism has been one of the main focus areas of development in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (ANI). It was first promoted to reduce dependence on forest resources such as timber and later due to direct economic benefits such as increased revenue and employment. In recent years too, the NITI…
Ajithraj R. and Prerana Gawde After a two month-long election frenzy, midway through the month of Ramadan, in the muggy heat of Lakshadweep, and with a disordered circadian rhythm, we officially launched “fisheries co-management” jointly with the Lakshadweep Fisheries Department, in Kavaratti, the capital of Lakshadweep, earlier this year. Fisheries Co-management is an approach that…
Chandana Pusapati Nest environment influences various life history parameters in sea turtles such as embryonic development, gas exchange, sex determination, hatchling morphology and physiology etc. With growing sand temperatures around the world, sea turtle hatchlings face an eminent threat in the form of reduced size and locomotor ability due to high nest temperatures, leaving them…
Marianne Manuel The MuSIC workshop on small scale fisheries, food security and nutrition as held in Penang, Malaysia from the 18 th to the 22 nd of February and organised by WorldFish and FAO. The former is part of the CGAIR group of international research institutions and focuses on research around better fish production (inland…
Karishma Modi At the after-school learning programme, we have come to accept that change is not always dramatic. It often takes the shape of a very small, suddenly apparent step forward and signals a time to pause and reflect on what led up to it. One Monday afternoon at the end of January, we broke…
Shimul Bijoor, Deepika Sharma and Madhuri Ramesh During the first phase of our project, wherein we studied the governance and management of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in the Andamans, we observed the keen influence of tourism on the way that most spaces in the islands are governed. Tourism influenced which islands were better connected by…
By Tanmay Wagh and Madhuri Ramesh The Andaman and Nicobar islands are at the centre of multiple developmental activities with the tourism industry forming the major thrust area for economic development. With the growing impetus to tourism through subsidies, easy land acquisitions and higher connectivity, the number of tourism-related businesses have increased exponentially in…
By Mythreyi K In early December 2018, James and I headed to West Bengal to conduct a birdwatching workshop for budding tourist guides. The workshop took us all the way from Wandoor in the Andamans to the island of Kumirmari in the Sunderbans. Sunderban, “the only Mangrove-Tiger land of the planet” (Banerjee M, 2012) was…
By Tanya Koshy One of the most remarkable things about field visits is its ability to jolt you back to reality. Vulnerable communities who were earlier mere statistics in a larger, impersonal statistical picture that we absentmindedly scroll through as we sip our morning cup of chai, suddenly come to life as real people with real…