‘Let them drink water’: Media is burying the corporate plunder driving our climate crisis

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on May 28, 2026

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/05/28/let-them-drink-water-media-is-burying-the-corporate-plunder-driving-our-climate-crisis

India is at boiling point, literally. The world's hottest cities are all in India, and most are in Uttar Pradesh. It is a crisis that impacts the majority, especially the poor.  

Yet, it is not the dominant story in Indian media. It appears and disappears. Random statistics of “heat-related deaths” are reported. Maps are printed in which India is shown in blood-red, illustrating the unbearably high temperatures. 

And then media attention moves on to foreign visits by our leaders, to summits in Delhi, to the laughable “austerity” measures taken by members of the BJP in response to Prime Minister Modi’s call to cut back on petroleum-based products, etc.

Predictably, the story resurfaces when the Prime Minister urges people to stay hydrated and to offer water to others. Apparently, that's the best solution to beat the heat!

The deeper story of why we have arrived at this distinction, of a country literally at boiling point, is rarely pieced together, and even if it is, it finds little to no space in our overloaded mainstream media.

That reality has been staring us in the face for decades, and never more so than in the last decade, when every excuse to cut down prime forests for so-called “development” has been trotted out by the government and backed by a National Green Tribunal whose remit it was to do exactly the opposite.

Thankfully, independent news platforms and social media have created spaces for this story to be recorded and told. And the facts are alarming.   

Social media also facilitated calling out such statements, including Modi’s advice to stay hydrated, as this report in The Telegraph records. For instance, some critics mentioned the extent of forest destruction in places like Hasdeo, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and the Aravali hills, which were not acknowledged even as Modi handed out advice.

The story also gives the official statistics of heat-related deaths, clearly a gross underestimation of the reality: “The heat crisis has already led to deaths across several states, with Uttar Pradesh recording the highest toll at 17, followed by Telangana (16), Madhya Pradesh (14) and Maharashtra (11), according to Union health ministry data and media reports.”

You only have to step out into the heat to see how many millions of people are compelled to work in these high temperatures, as they have no choice but to sit in the shade. And even those who have some shelter for the night often have no electricity to use, even the one fan they might have to cool this space.

Vidya Krishnan, journalist and author of ‘Phantom Plague’, a book about the scourge of tuberculosis that still survives in India, writes a scathing opinion piece on Al Jazeera, where she questions the data on heat-related deaths.

She writes: “While the newspapers record a few deaths here and there, the majority of heat-related deaths go unrecorded in India. I know, from my decades as a health reporter, that those who die early in any catastrophe – like the HIV patients of the 1980s, or COVID-19 more recently – become numbers. Only after we have a mountain of bodies do we think to raise a flag and give it a name, perhaps even its own day. India has reached that point.” 

An interesting detail in her article is what Modi said in 2014 to students: “Climate has not changed. We have changed. Our habits have changed.”

Clearly, the understanding of the most powerful man in this country about why India has arrived at this boiling point has not changed in the last decade and more. In the meantime, according to many studies, including those cited in this article in the New Scientist, “Since 2014, the planet has been warming by about 0.36°C per decade, according to an analysis of five temperature datasets, raising fears that climate tipping points could be crossed earlier than expected.”

In 2026, we don’t need to repeat what has been known for decades, that one of the factors contributing to global warming is the destruction of natural forests. No amount of so-called “compensatory afforestation”, which is often no more than an empty gesture, will replace the role that natural forests play in mediating the effects of climate change and global warming.

Unfortunately, this wisdom has failed to percolate to current policymakers in India. Instead of conserving what remains of our forests, millions of trees are being cut down every day in India.

 

In cities like Mumbai, for instance, irreplaceable mangroves are being felled for a road that will serve only a small percentage of the city’s population. Protests by concerned citizens fall on deaf ears. There are similar examples in most of our cities, big and small, that create heat islands, where, once again, the poor pay the price even as the better-off can insulate themselves.

Away from the cities, and therefore of the media that doesn’t care to cover stories that do not cater to the interests of its viewers/readers, the destruction is inestimable. According to this report in The Indian Express, 1742.6 hectares in the “high conservation zone” of the Hasdeo forest in Chhattisgarh will be cleared for a coal mine owned by the Adani group. This is in addition to two large coal mines that already operate in an area once considered inviolate. “In the first five years, 97,837 trees will be cut; In phase II, between year six and ten, 59,712 trees will be cut”, according to the story. This is destruction on a scale that is hard to imagine if you are someone who has lived and grown up in an urban jungle. 

Odisha is another state where hectares of forests are being cleared for coal and bauxite mines in Rourkela, Koraput and Angul. According to this investigative story by Reporters’ Collective, even the Karlapat Wildlife Sanctuary is not excluded. The forests in the southern part of the sanctuary, an important elephant corridor, are set to be handed over to the multinational company Vedanta for bauxite mining by redrawing the sanctuary’s borders.

There are many more such examples of the devastation being wrought on India’s forests. The stories are hard to find, often available only on independent digital news platforms. Together, they paint a picture of a government at the Centre that appears to deny the reality of climate change and is willing to go to any lengths to facilitate business houses.  The price for such a policy is being felt every year, including this year.  And the price is being paid by those whose voices are drowned out. 

This is India 2026. You will never know this if you only read and watch the country’s mainstream media.  You will never know this if you only rely on official statements. You will never know this unless you step out of your comfort zone.

 

From climate change to healthcare: Why is there no space for these issues in Big Media?

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 3, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/09/03/from-climate-change-to-healthcare-why-is-there-no-space-for-these-issues-in-big-media

So, "the longest war", as the US media insists on calling their country's engagement in Afghanistan, has ended. But is this really the end of the story? And has war and conflict really ended in a country ravaged by both for decades?

As you scroll through the extensive coverage in the international media leading up to the American withdrawal, there is next to nothing about another war that Afghanistan has been facing well before the takeover by the Taliban.

Of course, the repatriation of Afghans wanting to move out of the country will continue to engage the international media and, to some extent, what happens to women's education and employment. But alongside this is the humanitarian crisis that has been unfolding in the country even before the Taliban took over on August 15. How will Afghanistan's economy, so heavily dependent on foreign aid, survive? Who will be hit the hardest by this drastic downturn?

Apart from the economic crisis, according to this Reuters report, Afghanistan has been reeling under a severe drought. An estimated 12 million people, out of a population of 36 million, are facing “a food security crisis of not knowing when or where their next meal will come from”. This is in addition to rising food costs across the country. So, irrespective of the political developments or the kind of government that is eventually formed or whether it is recognised by the world, the harsh reality facing millions of Afghans will be finding food for their next meal.

The healthcare system in the country is also close to collapse. A representative of Médecins Sans Frontières is quoted in this report saying: “The overall health system in Afghanistan is understaffed, under-equipped and underfunded, for years. And the great risk is that this underfunding will continue over time.” As a result, the existing health facilities are already running short of supplies, even in the cities. One can imagine how much more dire the situation must be in the rural areas.

With the media restricted, will we ever know the suffering of ordinary Afghans who live away from the cities? According to Reporters Without Borders, less than 100 of the 700 women journalists in Kabul are still working. “Women journalists are in the process of disappearing from the capital,” it notes as many Afghan journalists, women and men, are leaving the country. At the same time, the international media have drastically reduced their presence. So, who will write these stories?

It is perhaps inevitable that geopolitics and speculation about what the Taliban will do will continue to dominate the news. This is, in any case, a given in most countries, including in India. Here, political news and government pronouncements hog news space while reports about drought, floods, hunger, and environmental crises are barely reported, if at all.

For instance, even as newspapers were spilling over with advertisements and sage pronouncements about “India at 75”, marking the beginning of India's 75th year of independence, an estimated 2.25 lakh people in 15 districts in Assam were affected by floods. Just going by numbers affected, this is newsworthy. And even if floods are an annual occurrence, in the past, such natural disasters would be reported and featured in the "national" pages of newspapers. Today, you have to work hard to find such news except in the newspapers of that region.

Then take healthcare. One of the positive outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic has been that health coverage in the media has been given importance. In the past, reporters assigned the health beat scarcely got any recognition. Today, many of them, the majority of them being women journalists, are names we recognise for the excellent and persistent coverage they have done of the pandemic.

But there are other diseases too that afflict and kill Indians at all times. Many of these diseases, such as malaria, dengue and encephalitis, are closely linked with the appalling sanitary conditions in which millions of people live in cities and villages. The boastful advertisements and statements about the success of campaigns like Swachh Bharat, etc have failed miserably to make a dent on innumerable fetid open drains and sewers around which poor communities live because they have no option to move elsewhere. These are the people who struggle each monsoon with vector-borne diseases, and the poor state of our health infrastructure makes their lives even more precarious.

This distressing report in Newslaundry of an apparent “mystery illness” that has already killed 34 children in Firozabad, Uttar Pradesh, is just one of similar reports you can find in the media if you look hard enough. The media's neglect of these stories compounds the crisis as governments, like that of Yogi Adityanath in UP, can get away with boasting about what a superb job they are doing in looking after the health of people living in their states.

Then take another perennial, the impact of global warming. This is drawing considerable attention worldwide, partly due to the increase in forest fires in Europe and the US, as also flash floods and now hurricanes. The environmentalist Bill McKibben, who has been writing and campaigning on the links between global warming and the continuing burning of fossil fuels with extreme climate events, reiterates yet again in a piece in the New Yorker that the latest hurricane to land on the shores of the US is the result of simple physics. No one can put it better than he does when he writes:

“Hurricanes...draw their power from heat in the ocean. If there’s more heat, the hurricane can get stronger. Physics. Warm air can hold more water than cold air can. So in warm, arid areas you get more evaporation, and hence more drought, and hence more fire. Physics. The water that’s been evaporated into the atmosphere comes down: more flooding rainfall. Physics. The earth runs on energy. We’re trapping more of it near the planet’s surface because of the carbon dioxide that comes from burning coal and gas and oil. That energy expresses itself in melting ice sheets, in rising seas, in the incomprehensible roar of the wind as a giant storm crashes into a city of steel and glass. It’s not, in the end, all that complicated.”

But in India, our coverage of the impact of climate change remains sporadic. In Mumbai, for instance, the municipal commissioner is quoted as saying that 80 percent of Mumbai's Nariman Point (a business district), and Mantralaya (seat of the state government) will be underwater by 2050. He was speaking at the launch of the Mumbai Climate Action Plan website. He also said that in the last 15 months, Mumbai had been hit by three cyclones.

Yet, the city's municipal corporation that he heads is hell-bent on building a coastal road that will increase fossil-fuel guzzling privatised transport, benefit only a small percentage of the population, and add to the city's existing burden of air pollution besides contributing to global warming. There has been practically no discussion in local media questioning the municipal commissioner or debating how India's financial capital will survive if large parts are submerged in just 30 years.

Apart from the impact of global warming, a report by the University of Chicago's Air Quality Life Index finds that India is the most polluted country in the world. Air pollution, it states, could cut life expectancy by nine years in north India and 2.5 years in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. While organisations dedicated to environmental issues like the Centre for Science and Environment have been campaigning for action, mainstream media also needs to find ways to illustrate how this will affect the lives of people, particularly the poorest and most marginalised. Without that, there is little hope of policy makers feeling any kind of pressure to take action.

Even if subjects like climate change, pollution, health care, sanitation, and nutrition don't grab headlines, they affect the survival of millions of people. And just on those grounds, they are “newsworthy”.

Unfortunately, given the nature of the dominant media India, namely television news, the concept of what constitutes news has been so distorted that not just the subjects that I've mentioned, but entire regions and populations of this country, are being permanently obscured. Unlike in Afghanistan, there are plenty of journalists in India who can cover these stories. But the space for them to report on these issues is shrinking by the day.

A water-less future

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, January 10, 2009

Water wars are not a figment of sci-fi imagination. Access to water will define the gap between the rich and the poor…

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The trend in urban development is more waste and less conservation...

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photo: N. Sridharan

Common resource?Water at a premium for some....

Can you manage a family of five or more on four buckets of water day? That is a maximum of 80 litres a day. Not per person but for five people. Therefore, 20 litres per person per day. And then there are days when there is not a drop of water. This is the challenge facing millions of people, not in a water-deprived desert area but in Mumbai, the city with the best supply of water of any city in India.

So if people predict that the next water wars in this decade will take place not between nations but between communities in our cities, they are not far off the mark. The wars will be between the poor, the most deprived, and between the rich and the poor. The rich will also suffer water cuts, as they already do. But they will manage without having to face too much hardship because they will always have the ability to hoard, store and buy water. The poor, on the other hand, will get less than they already do, which is little enough. And without permanent housing, they will never have the same ability to store water, as do those who live in puccabuildings. So the gap between the rich and the poor will be defined through access to water.

Increased burden

With this scarcity, the burden on women will increase, as it already has. Receding water tables and decreasing snow melt have forced millions of women, in deserts and mountain regions, in villages and towns, to work harder to find water. Somehow they must fulfil their principal duties of washing, cleaning, cooking — and so they scrounge and beg, and walk longer distances to fetch that one, two or three buckets of precious water.

The other reality that is emerging is how, in times of scarcity, no one wants to share, be generous, least of all those who have enough. Housing societies in Mumbai, for instance, are making rules not allowing “outsiders” from taking out water from the buildings. These “outsiders” are actually the “insiders”, the domestic help in all our homes without whom our lives would be really difficult. They are the people who cook and clean and wash. They do this in homes where water flows through taps. And then when they finish work, they go out of the buildings to their homes in a slum where there are days without a drop of water. Yet, we feel justified in denying such people water at times of acute need. There is no culture in the world that defends the denial of water to a thirsty or needy person. Yet, the urban middle class ethos is defending just this.

Islands of indulgence

Islanded from this growing reality of the water crisis are also the gated communities and “future cities” that bore down and pull up the common resource from underground water springs, unmindful of the impact on people dependent on these streams. As a result, people who always had enough for their needs are now the needy while those with the financial resources to build these new urban islands feel no compunction in justifying the wasteful use of what they like to call “their” water. While their pools and fountains never run dry, the villages around them wonder why their wells have no water.

These are times where we need to learn from those who survive on practically no water, or very little. There are hundreds of examples in India of traditional communities who have survived on very little. Yet, their example is rarely heeded. Instead, the trend in urban development, particularly, is more waste and less conservation based on a totally unrealistic understanding of the availability of water as a common resource.

There is one community that can certainly teach us, and the whole world, the value of water. And that is the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. A fascinating book on water that those planning our water policy should read is Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Droughtby James G. Workman (published by Walker Publishing Co., New York, 2009). Workman, an international water expert, studied the Bushmen in the heart of the Kalahari Desert in present-day Botswana. And he realised that these are the real water experts. The situation in which the Bushmen survived is something we cannot imagine. Yet survive they did, until non-Bushmen decided to cut off their access of water and forced them to move.

An ethics of sharing

Workman describes the Bushmen “code of conduct” with regard to water. It “allows people to negotiate informally over the water resources they require, reaching out to partners with whom to exchange if and when they need more or less. People increased supply by efficiently reducing demands, and the benevolent result of their integrated informal right to water brought Bushmen into a relative state of social abundance.”

A wonderful phrase — “state of social abundance”. Instead what we are seeing in our cities is precisely the opposite because of an ethos that despises generosity and sharing. Explaining further the Bushmen's approach to the crisis of water, Workman writes:

Prepared for extreme deprivation, Kalahari Bushmen chose the hard responsibility of a dry reality over a government-dependent fantasy of water abundance. Outside of their reserve the so-called civilised world found that for all our military might and Internet bandwidth, certain things still lie beyond our grasp. We discover we cannot ‘regulate' our climate, clouds or rain. Out here, while elected leaders kneel to pray for a thundershower that will provide temporary relief, the increasingly dry hot wind whistles through the thorn trees in the central Kalahari and whispers the ancient secret those last defiant Bushmen never forgot. We don't govern water. Water governs us.”

Indeed, water will govern us. It will also determine whether we can be a humane society.

(To read the original, click on the link above)