Safina Nabi

Anu Priya Kumari always dreamed of wearing a wedding dress like the bright, ornately embroidered ones she saw on social media. But she knew that buying such a dress would stretch the limited savings of her farming family in India’s eastern Bihar state.
Then, a local volunteer for the New Delhi-based nonprofit Goonj reached out to the family about its free wedding kits, which provide garments and other wedding items assembled from donated materials. Instead of buying new clothes that would lik...

DHADKAI, India—In a remote mountain hamlet nestled in the rugged beauty of Jammu and Kashmir, Mohammad Aftab begins his mornings tending to cattle—work that sustains his family, but does not reflect his true calling. Aftab, who is about 30 years old, is a trained mason, widely regarded as one of the area’s most skilled. Yet he rarely works beyond Dhadkai’s narrow paths—all because of a hearing and speech impairment that he’s lived with since childhood.
“He was like this from the beginning,” s...

Climate stress is rewriting the region’s rules of water sharing.

CHENAB VALLEY, Jammu and Kashmir—Shama Begum, wearing a traditional shalwar kameez and a pink scarf draped over her head, sits in her kitchen in Dungduro village, her back pressed against a cracked wall. Now in her late 40s, she grew up in Sewarbatti, not far from Kishtwar district, about a 155-mile journey by car from the city of Jammu.

Her whole life has revolved around the Chenab River. Her family looked after the springs tha...

Neighbors noticed. Farmers from nearby villages waded into Dar’s plot to see the revived stems for themselves. Dar shared his methods openly. By 2023, at least 15 households across three villages had restored their own lake patches, pooling labor, tools and harvests. What began as an individual effort turned into a small, cooperative movement, farmer-to-farmer, without formal funding or oversight.
The idea did not stop at open water. Elsewhere in the region, farmers dealing with a different c...

How New Delhi’s pollution has become a more fundamental crisis.
On a grey November morning in New Delhi, school administrators issued a familiar set of emergency orders: Playgrounds were closed, outdoor activities were canceled, and physical education classes were moved indoors. The reasoning had nothing to do with rain or cold. The air itself was too hazardous for children to breathe.
The announcements were delivered calmly, procedurally, with a seasonal rhythm. In the capital of the world’s...

Dispatch
The complicated life of women struggling with climate change—and cultural change—in Kashmir’s mountains.
PEER KI GALI, Jammu and Kashmir—It was a breezy, sunny noon at Peer Ki Gali, a mountain pass in the Pir Panjal range of the Himalayas, connecting the Poonch and Shopian districts of Jammu and Kashmir. As the sun and clouds played hide and seek, 20-year-old Asima Chaudhary, a Gujjar-Bakarwal herder, a nomadic community known for rearing sheep and goats across the mountains, watched...

In the middle of a concrete tower block, Jain has carved out a subtle revolution. Her apartment challenges the assumption that eco-friendly living belongs only to villages or luxury retreats. Instead, it shows how practices passed down the centuries can find urgent new expression in the most unlikely places: A middle-class high-rise on the edge of Delhi.
Jain’s inspiration came from Van Bhoj, a mud-house in Faridabad that was built in the 1990s on the site of a former stone quarry using tradi...

The morning sun had barely risen over the Pir Panjal mountain range in the Lower Himalayas, but the air already carried an unnatural weight. To its north-east, near the Indian-administered region of Jammu and Kashmir’s largest city, Srinagar, lies Astanmarg, a higher altitude pasture whose cooler air once drew local communities to bring their livestock grazing during the warmer months.
But in mid-May 2025, the temperature was unusually high in the early mornings. Seventy-year-old Rahim Poswal...

The Indian government’s global ambitions are undermined by regional uprisings from Bangladesh to Nepal.
DIBYANGSHU SARKAR / AFP)
NEW DELHI—Back-to-back student-led uprisings in Bangladesh and Nepal have toppled governments there, signaling a generational shift in South Asian politics. From Colombo to Dhaka to Kathmandu, Generation Z is emerging as a disruptive force, challenging corruption, dynastic elites, and stagnant economies.
The scale and speed of these social movements have surprised e...

Just 10 minutes before Kalgi, a village in Uri, was hit by a shell after tensions escalated between India and Pakistan during Operation Sindoor, Zahida Bano had managed to escape her family home with her 16-day-old baby. Her home is just 10 km east of the Line of Control and it was 2 am.
Along with her family of 32, Zahida sought refuge in a bunker they had built in their backyard. Measuring 10×8 feet, it was the only bunker in the village. It took them more than a year and their life’s savin...

The next generation of Kashmiri leaders is entering politics without fluency in the local language.
SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP via Getty Images
It was a sunny mid-morning in South Kashmir, the kind of heat that slows everything down. Beneath the wide shade of a chinar tree, a group of young boys had gathered, their laughter ringing out as they huddled over a mobile phone. An elderly man walking past shook his head and muttered, “Today’s generation, always laughing at themselves.” Still clutching his ...

When he was growing up, Bikash Das heard whispers from time to time about girls vanishing from his Indian town, Basirhat. After a while, people stopped asking what had happened to them.
“It became something you didn’t talk about,” Mr. Das says.
It wasn’t until two decades ago, when he went away to college and began volunteering with a local nonprofit in Kolkata, that he started to connect the dots behind the disappearances. He learned that many girls who go missing in his flood-prone region a...

A warming planet is creating a new pipeline for exploitation – human trafficking – turning natural calamities into human tragedies.

Politics
Undocumented Bangladeshi climate migrants in India lack legal protections and face rising anti-immigrant rhetoric and crackdowns, all amplified by the ruling BJP government and Hindu nationalists
A 22-YEAR-OLD from Satkhira district in southwest Bangladesh, bordering the Indian state of West Bengal, shared the story of how she and her family had ended up in India some two years ago. Back in Bangladesh, she recalled, they lived on just BDT 200 a day – just over USD 2 at the time – the...