Roli Srivastava

Indian poet Amandeep Singh has turned for inspiration to the peace of the mountains in the past, but the idea for his latest poem was born at a workshop on climate change in busy Mumbai.

His poem - 'She Came Back' - which references a drying lake, solar panels, and the girl he loves riding an electric scooter - was the result of a unique collaboration between poets and researchers to create new works on love - and climate change.

Farmer Ganpatram Bheda, 66, fears he will lose his two acres of land in northwest India after scarce rainfall and extreme cold in recent years hit crop yields, trapping him in a web of loans with little help from the state to overcome his financial woes.

As small-scale Indian farmers like Bheda grapple with growing climate uncertainties, researchers this week called for a robust rural jobs scheme, crop insurance and mental healthcare to ease growing distress and suicide in agrarian communities.

As a child, Sanjay Shashikant Kerkar was happiest playing with screwdrivers and pliers, or burying his head in open car bonnets at a friend's garage, influenced by his father's job as a machine operator at a textile mill in central Mumbai.

Kerkar, 47, is now a long-serving mechanic with Mumbai's public transport operator where he repaired diesel buses until four years ago, when he was trained in the daily upkeep of the new electric buses his firm had procured.

A windy monsoon in Karnataka, India's leading state for clean energy production, last year eased pressure on the local government's three thermal coal-power plants, as humming wind turbines met power demand amid pleasant temperatures.

But to tackle this year's hot, energy-guzzling summer, with city-dwellers ramping up their use of air-conditioners and farmers their water pumps to combat heatwaves and above-normal temperatures, the coal-fed plants are now running full throttle.

Just outside the Reserve Bank of India's Monetary Museum - which charts the evolution of money, from barter to electronic transactions - Bachche Lal Sahani is testing the nation's newest form of currency, the e-rupee.

The 45-year-old fruit vendor is among the first retailers in India to use the central bank digital currency (CBDC) the RBI, launched as a pilot on Dec. 1, a month after the trial for wholesale, or interbank transactions, was rolled out.

Shashikant Midha learned to swim as a child in the river near his village in Dhanbad, one of India's largest coal-mining hubs, but he hasn't yet found time to dip in the pool at the apartment complex where he lives nowadays, far away in south India.

Working long hours on a car-assembly line in Tamil Nadu state, more than 1,700 km (1,056 miles) from home, Midha belongs to a trend of Indians migrating out of coal regions, triggered by dwindling and low-paying jobs in a changing industry.

India is unlikely to sign a deal with richer nations this year for a just energy transition, as international funding rests on India committing to a timeline to phase out coal, an "unviable" proposition for the country, energy analysts said.

The Group of Seven (G7) industrialised nations, together with Norway, Denmark and the European Union, believe a 'just energy transition partnership' (JETP) with India will financially empower it to reduce climate changing emissions from power production.

A tip-off led police officer Indradeo Rajwar into the Nimiya Tola forests of Hazaribagh, in eastern India, hot on the trail of two men on a motorcycle carrying stolen coal.

As Rajwar closed in, the men dumped 1,200 kg (2,646 lb) of the dirty fossil fuel and escaped. Rajwar's report on the incident in Jharkhand state documents a story of theft that is common across India's main coal-mining areas.

Posters urging "NTPC Go Back" have appeared in Joshimath, a subsiding Indian Himalayan town where roads are cracking and houses crumbling - a crisis locals blame largely on a hydropower project led by India's biggest electricity producer NTPC.

Residents in the tourist hub of Joshimath are demanding a halt to the project, in the latest of a wave of protests across regions where hydroelectric facilities are being built, as India boosts clean energy to cut its planet-heating carbon emissions.

Farmer Shiv Lal barely slept this week, overcome by worry about the deep cracks scarring his land and hundreds of other homes and buildings in a sinking town in India's Himalayas.

On Jan. 2 and 3, Lal and other residents of Joshimath in northern Uttarakhand state woke to find large cracks running through their walls and floors. Outside, roads and walkways had caved in and cracked as the land beneath them shifted.