A River Comes Back, and an 85-Year-Old Teacher Who Never Needed a Notebook
Five good things happening in India this week
Namaste, and welcome back to Today’s India.
This week’s good news comes from a river bank in Madhya Pradesh, a lab in Assam, a phone camera in Gurugram, a sand pit in Kerala and a squash court in Brno. Different places, same idea: ordinary people doing the patient work that makes the country better.
1. The Singri River is flowing again
The Singri, a 39.6 km tributary of the Narmada in Narsinghpur, had been choked by encroachments, sewage and silt. Since February, the district has been bringing it back, and it is doing it through the gram panchayats rather than big contractors.
Zilla Panchayat CEO Gajendra Singh Nagesh split a ₹4.8 crore sanction into 26 small projects run by the panchayats themselves. Villagers cleared the banks, raised the riverbed, planted around 100 acres with local species and built a 600-metre riverfront with a community hall and open-air theatre. Borrowed machines did the heavy lifting, with only the diesel paid for.
The water is not fully clean yet, and some drains still need fixing. But the fish are coming back. Read the full story
2. Clean drinking water in three minutes
Millions of Indians drink groundwater laced with arsenic or fluoride. A team at IIT Guwahati, led by Professor Mihir Kumar Purkait, has found a faster way to clean it: a water treatment reactor with a spinning aluminium electrode.
In tests on Assam groundwater, it removed about 98% of arsenate and 91% of fluoride in roughly three minutes, at an estimated ₹18 to ₹58 per 1,000 litres. The next test is the real world, outside the lab. Read more
3. A Class 12 student is measuring our night sky
Suhani Gupta, a Class 12 student from Gurugram, missed seeing stars. So she built SkyQi, a free website that estimates light pollution from a single phone photo of the night sky.
It has already collected nearly 1,200 photos from more than 490 contributors in 63 countries. Her analysis of satellite data for 50 Indian cities found night-time brightness rose in 47 of them over the last decade. You can add a reading from your own terrace. Read more
4. An 85-year-old teacher, a pile of sand and a stick
In Kerala, 85-year-old Indira Amma has spent the past decade teaching young children Malayalam, Hindi, English and maths without a single notebook. The children trace letters in sand with their fingers, the way Kerala’s Ezhuthiniruthu ceremony has marked first lessons for generations.
No app, no coaching centre, no advertising. Parents simply hear about her from other parents. Read more
Every town has an Indira Amma. A tutor everyone recommends, a yoga teacher with a waiting list, an electrician who always picks up. Most of them are still found only by word of mouth.
That is what we are working on at OpenMap: giving local businesses, tutors, coaches and trainers their own page and AI agent, so people (and the AI assistants they use) can find them and send them requests. We are launching in London first.
If you know people like this, in London or wherever your circle reaches, we would love your help introducing them. Become an OpenMap partner
5. A new title for Velavan Senthilkumar
Indian squash player Velavan Senthilkumar has won the USD 35,000 Czech Open in Brno, the second PSA Copper-level title of his career. A quiet, steady climb worth cheering. Read more
That’s it for this edition. If one of these stories made you smile, forward it to someone who could use a bit of good news today.
See you in the next edition.
Team Today’s India