Namaste, and welcome back to Today’s India. This week: an unlikely notebook, five billion litres of saved water, and a craft kept alive by one act of kindness.
1. A father and daughter in Assam are turning rhino dung into notebooks
Retired mining engineer Mahesh Chandra Bora read on a flight about paper made from elephant dung in Rajasthan, and wondered why Assam, home to elephants and one-horned rhinos, could not do the same. He began experimenting at home with his wife’s kitchen blender and window screens.
His daughter Nisha left 17 years in the corporate world to join him, and in 2014 they founded Elrhino. The dung is cleaned, washed and boiled into pulp, mixed with recycled paper and cotton waste, then pressed into sheets for notebooks, journals, lampshades and playing cards.
Villagers living near wildlife habitats collect the dung and help make the paper, earning extra income. When elephants and rhinos bring value as well as trouble, the people living beside them gain one more reason to protect them. Read the full story
2. Two Chennai engineers have helped buildings save five billion litres of water
EarthFokus, an IIT Madras-incubated startup founded in 2019 by Arun Subramanian and Rishi Vandan, began with a humble tap. A regular tap can release 10 to 12 litres a minute; their fixture brings that down to as little as half a litre.
Today its sensors track water use across commercial buildings and flag oddities, like a steady flow in a washroom at 2 am, which usually means a leak. Another system captures droplets from cooling tower plumes and returns them to use. The company says more than 130 buildings have saved over five billion litres, and that at WeWork India, use fell from 45 to 29 litres per person a day. Read the full story
3. At 75, Kashmir’s last Mukh maker is passing his craft to his son
In Srinagar, Abdul Majeed Zargar hand-carves the Mukh, the small wooden shuttle that carries thread across a loom. Without it, no handwoven Pashmina shawl gets made. He is believed to be the last craftsman in Kashmir who still makes them by hand.
When he started nearly five decades ago, workshop after workshop turned him away. Then a group of experienced craftsmen bought three pairs of his flawed shuttles, simply so he would not lose hope, and recommended him to other weavers. In time, weavers waited months for his tools. He replaced rust-prone iron parts with brass, and is now teaching his son so the skill survives. Read the full story
Zargar’s whole career began with one recommendation. Every neighbourhood has someone like him: a maths tutor parents swear by, a tailor with a queue before every festival, a fitness coach whose clients keep bringing friends. Most of them are still found only by word of mouth.
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 tutors, trainers, makers or small business owners like these, in London or wherever your circle reaches, we would love your help introducing them. Become an OpenMap partner
4. A Bengal professor turned free meals into 20+ free learning centres
Nearly ten years ago, after his son’s birthday party, college professor Chandrashekhar Kundu saw a little girl eating discarded biryani while her brother kept stray dogs away. He started feeding children and became known as the ‘Foodman’, serving nearly 180 children across three villages.
He soon saw that many of them, from families working in stone quarries or as daily-wage labourers, had no one to help with schoolwork. So the meals came with study support. With local teachers and volunteers, his organisation FEED now lists more than 20 free coaching locations across West Bengal, and it still serves meals. Read the full story
5. Aarey’s Warli women have stitched their way into salaried jobs
In 2019, the Warli Adivasi communities of Mumbai’s Aarey forest were at the centre of protests over a metro car shed. Since then, a stitching programme run by Cassandra Nazareth and her team, which began with 27 sewing machines, has led many of the women into factory jobs.
Shubhangi Rohakar, 35, earns ₹20,000 a month and, for the first time in her life, has a provident fund. Other women now have medical cards that cover their families, and bank accounts of their own. Read the full story
If one of these stories made you smile, forward this email to someone who could use some good news today.
See you in the next edition.
Team Today’s India