Keya Acharya is an independent journalist and
          researcher, who has been writing exclusively on
          environment and development for many years and has
          various national and international publications to
          her credit. She also teaches development journalism
          and development issues to media students in
          Bangalore, where she is based and has conducted
          several media training workshops. Keya has
          travelled extensively in the course of her
          journalism assignments, reporting from various
          countries on subjects as diverse as solid and
          hazardous wastes, to human rights, corruption,
          forestry and wildlife, climate change, agribiotech
          and others. E-mail: [log in to unmask]

Frederick Noronha is a Goa-based journalist and the founder
of the India-EJ, the environmental journalists' cyber-network
that links those writing on green issues across India. His
works focus on developmental themes and he recently launched
an alternative book publishing venture, Goa1556
http://goa1556.goa-india.org. He is known for his work on
Right to Information issues (including in unearthing the
frequent-but-unnoticed crashes of Sea Harrier planes of the
Indian Navy), and effectively linking campaigners who worked
on a long and successful drive to launch community radio in
India. E-mail: [log in to unmask]

Contributors

Kazimuddin (Kazu) Ahmed is an anthropologist presently
working with Panos South Asia and is based out of Guwahati,
Assam. He has earlier worked with Down to Earth and North
Eastern Social Research Centre. His areas of interest include
borders, migration, resource politics, identities, conflict
and media issues. He also experiments with documentary film-
making and photographic documentation.

Shahidul Alam studied and taught chemistry in London
University before taking up photography. He returned to his
hometown Dhaka in 1984, where he photographed the democratic
struggle to remove General Ershad. A former president of the
Bangladesh Photographic Society, Alam set up the Drik Agency,
the Bangladesh Photographic Institute and Pathshala: The
South Asian Media Academy Institute of Photography. He has
been a recipient of the Mother Jones, Howard Chapnick and
Andrea Frank awards. Alam is also a jury member at numerous
international contests including World Press Photo, which he
has judged on three occasions. He is an Honorary Fellow of
the Bangladesh Photographic Society and the Royal
Photographic Society.

Pallava Bagla has been a globally acclaimed award winning
photo-journalist for 20 years. He has written for Science,
the prestigious weekly magazine of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Washington DC, for
over a decade. He recently joined NDTV, India's well-known
television channel, as science editor. His solo photo
exhibition on water issues titled 'Drops of Life' has been
displayed globally.

Bagla is also a still photographer working for Corbis, one of
the world's largest photo agency owned by Microsoft chief,
Bill Gates. His pictures have found place in respected
magazines like National Geographic, Time, Nature, New
Scientist, Scientific American, Newsweek, Elle and The
Economist. He has published over 800 news and features
stories in leading national and international publications;
authored five books; edited five books and over 1,700 of his
photographs have been published over the years. He was also a
frequent contributor to the leading national daily The Indian
Express. In 2006, he was conferred the National Award for
Outstanding Effort in Science & Technology Communication in
Print Medium. It is the highest honour of its kind for
science journalism in India, given by the Union Ministry of
Science and Technology. In 2003, he became the first Indian
to win the Outstanding Journalism award from the United
Nations-sponsored Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the world's apex body looking
after agricultural research and headquartered at the World
Bank, Washington DC. Previously, he was awarded the
prestigious science writing fellowship at the Marine
Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA in
1994. In 2004, he became a Fellow of the Leadership for
Environment and Development (LEAD), London. E-mail:
pbagla@vsnl

Lyla Bavadam is a senior assistant editor with Frontline
magazine. She writes on issues specific to the environment as
well as on politics and development. She has been with The
Hindu group since 1996 and has been a working journalist
since 1992. Prior to this she worked with a documentary film
unit that produced films and slide shows for clients like
UNICEF, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Ministry of
Human Resource Development, Government of India and the
Public Health Department, Municipal Corporation of Greater
Mumbai. She was the first Bellagio Forum Fellow, a programme
for Environmental Studies in collaboration with the Reuters
Foundation Fellowship Programme. She also received the Panos
Reproductive Health Media Fel- lowship for research that got
published in a compilation The Unheard Scream.

She was spotlighted at the Sanctuary Awards in the Defender
of Nature category because of her writings on the
environment. She has written cnsistently on issues like the
Narmada Dam, groundwater, drought and environmental policy.

          Dionne Bunsha is an award-winning journalist in
          Mumbai, India, who has written about suicide deaths
          among farmers, religious strife in India, human
          rights, environment and a range of other crucial
          issues. She currently works for the Frontline
          magazine of The Hindu group. She is the author of
          Scarred: Experiments with Violence in Gujarat
          (2006). Bunsha is a Knight International Journalism
          Fellow at Stanford University 2008-09 and has won
          several awards for her writing. She was awarded two
          of the prestigious Ramnath Goenka Excellence in
          Journalism Awards, 2006-07 for Environmental
          Reporting and Books (non-fiction), the
          International Federation of Journalists (IFJ)
          Journalism for Tolerance Prize for South Asia 2005,
          the Sanskriti Award for Journalism 2003 and the
          People's Union for Civil Liberties Human Rights
          Award 2003. She has a Master's degree in
          development studies from the London School of
          Economics and has also completed a diploma in
          social communications media from the Sophia
          Polytechnic, Mumbai.

Patralekha Chatterjee is a Delhi-based award-winning writer
and pho- tographer. She has reported on public health, human
rights, environment and the economy from many countries for
leading publications in Asia, Europe and North America
including The Lancet.

Ardeshir Cowasjee (born 1926) is a renowned newspaper
columnist from Karachi, Sindh in Pakistan. His columns
regularly appear in the country's oldest English language
daily newspaper Dawn and are translated to appear in the Urdu
press. He is also Chairman of the Cowasjee Group and is
engaged in philanthropic activities apart from being regarded
as an old 'guardian' of the city of Karachi.

          Kunda Dixit served as the Asia-Pacific Regional
          Editor of Inter Press Service, and later helped
          establish Panos South Asia in Kathmandu. He is now
          the editor and publisher of Nepali Times and is the
          author of the books Dateline Earth and A People War.

Nirmal Ghosh is a senior foreign correspondent for The
Straits Times, based in Bangkok, Thailand. He has lived and
worked in Singapore, Manila, New Delhi and Bangkok, and
covered much of Asia as a photojournalist. He has been
President of the Foreign Correspondents Association of the
Philippines (1998-99) and of the Foreign Correspondents
Club of Thailand (2008-09). He has written on and
photographed wildlife, and covered related issues like
biodiversity and climate change for over 25 years and has
authored three books on Indian natural history and wildlife.
In 2004, he won awards for narration and conservation message
at Missoula, Montana, USA, for the documentary film Living
with Giants (camera Ashish Chandola). He is a Trustee of The
Corbett Foundation, a wildlife conservation NGO working with
communities living on the periphery of Corbett Tiger Reserve
in northern India and in Kutch in western India. From 2001 to
2003 he was on the Steering Committee of the Government of
India's Project Elephant.

Peter Griffin used to be in advertising and is now a
journalist and web producer. He works in Mumbai and likes to
get out to green, cool places with either mountains or water
bodies in easy reach. He blogs at zigzackly. blogspot.com and
helps run the writing community, Caferati. He is very
impressionable: he became an environmentalist as a child when
he saw an advertisement that said, 'Don't waste water;
you'll need it later.'

Nalaka Gunawardene is Director and CEO of TVE Asia Pacific,
www. tveap.org. Trained as a science writer and journalist,
Nalaka has worked with print and broadcast media and later
with development organisations across Asia for over 20 years.
He co-founded TVEAP in 1996 as a non-profit, regional
foundation using audio-visual and new media to communicate
development and social issues. Having originated the idea of
The Greenbelt Reports, Nalaka served as its writer and
executive producer. He blogs on media, development and
society at http://movingimages. wordpress.com/

Pandurang Hegde has been with the Appiko and Chipko
movements. After his post graduate study form the University
of Delhi, he joined the Chipko Movement in the Himalayas. He
joined Sunderlal Bahuguna in the historic Kashmir-Kohima
Foot March along the Himalayas. Thereafter he came to
Karnataka to help with the spread of Appiko Movement. He has
been part of the movement for the past 25 years. At present
he is motivating people to re-launch Save Western Ghats
Movement to conserve the tropical forests in south India. He
works as a freelance journalist, contributing articles on
environment and development issues in three languages:
English, Kannada and Hindi. E-mail: [log in to unmask],
[log in to unmask]

Nandkumar Kamat is a microbiologist at the Department of
Botany, Goa University, Goa. For years, he has been active in
highlighting environmental issues in Goa and elsewhere and
has an encylopaedic knowledge of a vast range of issues of
relevance to Goa. E-mail: [log in to unmask]

Richard Mahapatra is the South Asia Regional Coordinator at
the New Delhi office of the Bank Information Center (BIC),
which partners with civil society in developing and
transition countries to influence the World Bank and other
international financial institutions to promote social and
economic justice and ecological sustainability. Before
joining BIC, Richard worked as the coordinator of the
Environment and Poverty unit of the Centre for Science and
Environment (CSE) where he conceived, designed and led
campaigns on sustainable development. During his tenure as
the news coordinator of the environment magazine Down to
Earth, he reported extensively on environment-poverty
linkages in rural areas, people's movements for rights over
natural resources, and other livelihood issues. Before CSE,
he worked as a correspondent in mainstream media for five
years, focussing on Northeastern India. E-mail:
[log in to unmask]

Max Martin is a special correspondent at the Bangalore bureau
of the Mail Today. He writes on science and environment. From
2005 to 2007, he edited the web publication
indiadisasters.org and reported on tsunami rehabilitation. He
has also freelanced as a photojournalist. Email:
[log in to unmask]

Meena Menon has been a journalist since 1984 and has worked
with United News of India, Mid-Day and The Times of India,
Mumbai and is at present with The Hindu as a special
correspondent in Mumbai. She has won many fellowships,
including those from the Centre for Science and Environment,
Panos, the National Foundation for India, New Delhi and
SARAI. Her articles on prostitution have been compiled into a
book co-authored with Sharmila Joshi. She is also the author
of Organic Cotton: Reinventing the Wheel, a history and
compilation of organic cotton farmers in the country. E-mail:
[log in to unmask]

Laxmi Murthy is currently Associate Editor, Himal Southasian,
the monthly magazine published from Kathmandu. She has
written widely on gender, environment and the links between
the two. As a journalism instructor, she has conducted
training courses for working journalists on reporting gender.
Ahmed Zaki Nafiz is a Maldivian journalist. He has been based
in New Zealand and has worked in the Maldives. He has
travelled extensively in Asia, Europe and the Pacific.
E-mail: [log in to unmask]

Sunita Narain has been with the India-based Centre for
Science and Environment since 1982. She is currently the
director of the Centre and the director of the Society for
Environmental Communications and the publisher of the
fortnightly magazine Down to Earth. In her years at
theCentre, she has worked hard at analysing and studying the
relationship between environment and development and at
creating public consciousness about the need for sustainable
development. She has co-authored various publications like
Towards Green Villages (1989), Global Warming in an Unequal
World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism (1991) and Towards
a Green World: Should Environmental Management Be Built on
Legal Conventions or Human Rights? and has co-edited Dying
Wisdom: Rise, Fall and Potential of India's Traditional
Water Harvesting Systems (1997) and Green Politics: Global
Environmental Negotiations (2000). In 1999, she co-edited the
State of India's Environment, The Citizens' Fifth Report
and in 2001, Making Water Everybody's Business: Practice and
Policy of Water Harvesting. She has also authored many
articles and papers. Narain remains an active participant,
both nationally and internationally, in civil society. She
serves on the boards of various organisations and on
governmental committees and has spoken at many forums across
the world on issues of her concern and expertise. In 2005,
she was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India.

Shree Padre is a farmer by profession, a journalist by
obsession. Since over a decade, he has been zealously
documenting and disseminating information on the common
man's success stories of Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) from
all over India. Under his editorship, Adike Patrike, a
21-year- old unique farm magazine of, by and for the farmers
in Karnataka, started a pioneering campaign on RWH in
Karnataka. He has been a columnist for Vijaya Karnataka, a
leading Kannada daily, and has so far run 220 case studies in
six years. He contributes regularly to www.indiatogether.org
and Civil Society. He has written 11 books on RWH, ten in
Kannada and one in English. Out of this, two books are on
drought-proofing. He was in the forefront of the agitation
against spraying endosulfan in the Kasaragod district of
Karnataka. He has received many state awards as well as the
Statesman National Award for rural reporting. E-mail:
[log in to unmask]

Shivaram Pailoor is news editor and Head, News Unit, All
India Radio, Dharwad, Karnataka. He is also the trustee of
the Centre for Agricultural Media (CAM), which he founded in
2000. The Centre, with an objective to promote
farmer-friendly communication system, tries to build up
alternative efforts in agricultural communication. He has
launched a website: www.farmedia.org, as part of the venture.
Shivaram writes on developmental issues like soil and water
harvesting, GM issues and farm-related issues for major news
dailies and magazines in Karnataka. He has been working in
the field of mass communication for 18 years. Having done his
doctoral study on effectiveness of agriculture communication,
he has initiated a correspondence diploma course (Kannada) in
farm journalism through CAM in 2003. He is an Ashoka Fellow.
Email: [log in to unmask]

Beena Sarwar is a Pakistani journalist, documentary filmmaker
and artist. She has a BA in studio art and English literature
from Brown University (1986) and an MA in television
documentary from Goldsmiths College, University of London
(2001). She started her journalism career as an intern with
the Star Weekend, Karachi in 1981. Her editorial positions
include assistant editor at The Star Weekend, features
editor, The Frontier Post (Lahore), editor, The News on
Sunday, a weekly paper that she launched in Pakistan for The
News International and OpEd Editor for The News
International. She was a producer at Geo TV, Pakistan's
first 24-hour news channel. She is a Nieman Fellow (Harvard,
2006) and a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy
(2007). Her documentary films have been broadcast on various
channels and screened at festivals in Pakistan and abroad.
She serves on the board of Panos South Asia and is associated
with the Pakistan-India People's Forum for Peace and
Democracy (PIPFPD), the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan
and the Women's Action Forum (WAF). She freelances for
various publications in Pakistan and abroad, including Inter
Press Service, and is on the editorial board of the monthly,
Himal Southasian, Kathmandu. Nandana Saxenais a poet and
documentary filmmaker and was a television journalist
earlier.

Sahana Singh is Editor of Asian Water, Asia's leading
magazine on water and wastewater. She graduated from Delhi
College of Engineering and worked for some time as an
engineer in the Environment Department of HPCL Refinery in
Mumbai. After winning two national essay contests, she made a
career shift to writing. In 2003, she was one of the winners
of the Water Media Network Journalists Competition conducted
by the World Bank, and was awarded during the 3rd World Water
Forum at Kyoto. Her winning article focused on the threat of
marine organisms being transported to foreign waters through
ships and wiping out local species. In November 2008, Ms
Singh won the Developing Asia Journalism Award (DAJA) in the
Infrastructure category, in Tokyo, where journalists from
Asian countries competed. She lives in Singapore with her
husband and daughter.

Malini Shankar is a Bangalore-based freelance environmental
photojournalist specialising in content creation about
anthropogenic environmental conflict that seeks to quantify
the impact on wildlife conservation. She has specialised in
writing about anthropogenic environmental conflict in the
Western Ghats. Her articles have been published in Deccan
Herald, The New Indian Express, The Indian Express, The Times
of India, The Hindu Group of Publica- tions, and Features
Service Syndicates. She was the UN accredited correpondent
covering the proceedings at the World Summit on Sustainable
Development in Johannesburg for Bangalore-based Deccan Herald
in 2002. She has also produced 2-13 episodes of a series
for All India Radio and around a dozen world service radio
documentaries for Deutsche Welle and Panos Radio. Her
articles on Sariska and issues pertaining to tiger
conservation have been widely published. Besides, she has
just completed shooting for a multinational TV production
called 'Eco Crimes' which is to be broadcast in 16
countries in nine languages over a three-year-period.

Devinder Sharma is an award-winning journalist, writer, and
researcher respected globally for his analysis on food,
agriculture and trade policy. Trained as an agricultural
scientist, Sharma has worked for The Indian Express. He quit
active journalism to research on policy issues concerning
food and agriculture, biodiversity, genetic engineering and
IPRs, and hunger, trade and food security. He is the author
of GATT and India--- Politics of Agriculture (1994), GATT to
WTO: Seeds of Despair (1996), In the Famine Trap (1997) and
Trade Liberalisation in Agriculture: Lessons from the First
Ten Years of WTO (2005). His columns and writings have been
widely published in India and abroad.

          Kalpana Sharma is an independent journalist and
          columnist based in Mumbai. In over three decades as
          a full-time journalist, she has worked with The
          Hindu, for which she writes a column, The Times of
          India, The Indian Express and Himmat Weekly. She
          was one of the co-editors of CSE's First Citizens'
          Report on the State of India's Environment (1982).
          She was also responsible for 15 years for The
          Hindu's annual State of the Environment Report. She
          has authored Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from
          Asia's Largest Slum (2000) and co-edited two books
          with Ammu Joseph: Whose News? The Media and Women's
          Issues (1994/2006) and Terror, Counter-Terror:
          Women Speak Out (2003).

Sudhirendar Sharma, an environmentalist, was formerly with
the World Bank. He is an expert on water, a keen observer of
climate change dynamics, a critic of the contemporary
development processes, and has been dividing time as a
writer, researcher and consultant. He was a senior
correspondent with India's leading weekly India Today and
the science editor for The Pioneer newspaper. He holds a
Masters in agriculture and a doctorate in environmental
sciences.

S. Gopikrishna Warrier is Lead Media Officer at The
International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid
Tropics (ICRISAT). Earlier, he was principal correspondent at
The Hindu Business Line, the south India correspondent for
Down to Earth, and assistant editor at the Indian National
Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH). He has been an
experienced communicator and journalist specialising in
agricultural, environmental and developmental issues. In his
other work, he has developed relationships with key
stakeholders for public-funded international research
organisations and non-governmental organisations. As a
journalist he has specialised in communicating complicated
environment and science stories in simple language, with the
ability to link the macro with the micro developments. His
interests include writing, communication, travelling,
reading, photography and cooking. Email:
[log in to unmask]

Manori Wijesekera was a journalist and writer for several
years, working for an English language daily, a business
magazine and travel publications, before joining TVE Asia
Pacific in 1998. As its Regional Programme Manager, she
promotes the regional organisation's partnerships with
dozens of broadcast, civil society and educational
organisations across the Asia Pacific. Manori was production
manager of The Greenbelt Reports, managing four film-maker
teams across eight locations in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka
and Thailand. She also directed its Indonesian and Thai
stories.