Five good things happening in India this week
Namaste, and welcome back to Today’s India. This week we have purple flowers in a cold desert, a film made on almost no money, and villages that keep Diwali quiet for the sake of their bats.
1. Saffron is blooming in Leh
Saffron usually means Kashmir, which grows about 90 percent of India’s crop. Now Ladakh is trying its hand. On 1 October, nearly 800 kg of premium Iranian saffron corms, around 90,000 of them, were planted across 4,000 square metres of land in Leh that had been restored under Project Him Sarovar.
The surprise was the speed. Saffron generally takes close to two months to flower, but here the blooms appeared in less than 30 days. The field has been giving 20 to 25 flowers a day, with 72 on the morning Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena visited, and the team has already collected nearly 22 grams of pure saffron.
It is still a pilot, and more trials are needed. But if it works, it could mean new income for Ladakh’s farmers, young people and small agro businesses. Read the full story
2. A film about Goa’s goldsmiths, made with barely any budget, wins Best Documentary
Prachi Shirodkar, 28, had no camera experience and almost no money. What she had was a subject she knew well: the goldsmiths of Goa. Her Konkani documentary, Bhaangar Kalakusar Karigiri, has now won Best Documentary at the Miseentage Indian Film Awards.
She shot and narrated it herself in scattered bursts over several weeks. Her partner Mario Pimenta edited it, and her father, who worked in the trade, wrote the script in its own Konkani vocabulary. One scene shows an artisan carving a name into a ring with no machine at all. “It doesn’t even look like a knife; it looks like a wire,” she says. She also made sure to include women artisans, because “it’s not just men who do this anymore.”
The film has travelled to Jackson Doc Fest in Tennessee and the International Folklore Film Festival in Kerala. Read the full story
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3. Delhi friends who pay young artists to learn theatre
Learning theatre usually costs money that many young performers do not have. Bargad, a fellowship in Delhi’s Mandi House theatre district, turns that around. Its first two cohorts were paid ₹10,000 a month to train, and the third cohort, starting January 2027, will receive ₹15,000.
Classes run from 4 pm to 8.30 pm, six days a week, so fellows can still earn during the day. Co-founders Amba-Suhasini K Jhala and Anirudh Nair started with 14 fellows in January 2025, and applications grew from around 75 in the first year to about 200 in the second. Two production grants of ₹1 lakh each help fellows stage their own work. One group, led by a fellow named Lalit, put on six performances of a play called Hawa Mahal. Read the full story
4. Hyderabad opens India’s first private space debris facility
Space is getting crowded with junk, and a Hyderabad company wants to help clean it up. On 5 November, Cosmoserve Space opened Base 1, described as India’s first private space debris removal and satellite servicing facility, and the sixth in the world.
The 14,800 square foot facility has an orbital rendezvous and capture lab, a space robotics lab, a clean room and a mission simulation centre. Union Minister Jitendra Singh inaugurated it virtually, with Telangana IT Minister D Sridhar Babu present in person. The company plans a full-scale debris capture demonstration in 2027. Read more
5. The Tamil Nadu villages that keep Diwali quiet for their bats
As Diwali approaches, some villages in Tamil Nadu will stay almost silent. Hundreds of bats roost in their banyan and tamarind trees, and the villagers have chosen not to scare them away with firecrackers.
In Perambur, near Kollidam, people have skipped firecrackers for more than a century. In Kalapattu, near Katpadi, the practice has lasted three generations. Near Coimbatore, Kittampalayam is home to around 2,000 Indian flying foxes, and around 350 families agreed to avoid crackers. In Kazhuperumpakkam, the panchayat banned them altogether to help a colony that once numbered in the thousands. Read the full story
If one of these stories made you smile, forward this email to someone who could use some good news before Diwali. See you in the next edition.
Team Today’s India