Five good things happening in India this week
Namaste, and welcome back to Today’s India. This week we have a teenager mapping the night sky, a surprise harvest in the mountains and a campus that cooks with its own garden waste.
1. A Gurugram student built a free tool to measure the stars we are losing
Suhani Gupta, a Class 12 student in Gurugram, noticed that the sky above her city had almost no stars. So she built SkyQi, a free website that estimates night-sky quality from a single smartphone photo. It looks at how many stars are visible, how the horizon compares with the sky overhead, and how bright the sky is.
She also studied NASA satellite data for 50 Indian cities and found that the median city’s night-time brightness was 70% higher in 2025 than in 2015. Leh showed the steepest rise. Her platform has already received 1,198 photographs from more than 490 contributors across 63 countries, and she is open that it still needs testing against professional instruments.
2. Saffron is blooming on restored land in Ladakh
On 1 October, nearly 800 kg of Iranian saffron corms, around 90,000 of them, were planted across 4,000 square metres in Leh on land restored under Project Him Sarovar. Saffron usually takes about two months to flower. Here, the first blooms appeared in under 30 days.
When Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena visited on 1 November, the field was giving 20 to 25 flowers a day, and the team had collected nearly 22 grams of saffron in four days. It is still a pilot, and more trials are needed, but it hints at a new livelihood for a cold desert.
3. From a patch of cactus to a homestay that grows its own food
In 1994, Major Durga Das and his wife Jyoti Jasol bought 2.5 acres in the Aravalli hills near Udaipur. “All we saw was cactus,” Jyoti remembers. Their first plan, growing flowers for a hotel, failed, and for a while they moved to Delhi.
Jyoti came back, and in 2004 Devra welcomed its first guests. To revive the soil, the couple carried loamy earth from Pichola Lake when it dried in summer. Today Devra is a 10-bedroom heritage homestay that grows wheat, jowar, methi, vegetables and chikoo, and works closely with local craftspeople. Guests can join Jyoti’s heritage cooking classes and visit nearby villages.
Places like Devra are built by hand and found by word of mouth. The same is true of the cooking teacher down your lane, the yoga instructor everyone swears by and the carpenter who never misses a date.
OpenMap gives 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. It is launching in London first.
If you know hosts, teachers, coaches or makers like these, in London or wherever your circle reaches, we would love your help introducing them. Become an OpenMap partner
4. IIT Bombay is cooking for 1,200 students with garden waste
IIT Bombay’s campus produces nearly 2 tonnes of garden waste every day. With help from Infixen, a startup funded by the institute, that waste is now pressed into fuel pellets for cooking.
At Hostel 16, the pellets help prepare meals for 1,200 students and have cut LPG use by 60%. The campus used to spend nearly ₹50 lakh a year just to transport garden waste away. Now the leaves and twigs stay on campus and end up feeding people.
5. Three northeastern states team up for India’s only ape
Sixteen forest guards from Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura spent a week, from 24 to 30 October, training at Hollongapar Gibbon Sanctuary to protect the Western Hoolock Gibbon, India’s only ape. The programme was run by the research group Aaranyak with the Assam Forest Department.
The guards learned gibbon census methods, habitat restoration, GPS field research, rescue and rehabilitation, and wildlife law. The three states have also formed a cross-border alliance for the species, which is listed among the world’s 25 most endangered primates. Fewer than 10,000 are estimated to survive in the northeast.
If one of these stories made you smile, please forward this email to a friend who could use some good news. See you in the next edition.
Team Today’s India