Selected Works

Twenty images from a decade across India's forests, coasts, and wetlands, each chosen for the idea it carries, not only the subject it shows.
PORTFOLIO > SELECTED WORKS
A fisherman carrying a large stingray ray at a busy seafood market harbor with boats.
A fisherman carrying a large stingray ray at a busy seafood market harbor with boats.
Caption: The Spinetail devil ray (Mobula japanica) is not bycatch, it is a quietly sought target. Its meat stays within fishing communities; its fins move to China for use in traditional Chinese medicine. At Veraval, one of India's largest fish landing centres, this is an open secret.
Veraval, Gujarat — 2022
A herd of wild elephants grazing in a lush green tea garden under high-voltage power lines.
A herd of wild elephants grazing in a lush green tea garden under high-voltage power lines.
Caption: The Tarajuli herd of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) have always moved between forest fragments. The pylons came later. Every morning, they cross both.

Assam — 2021
A wild Bengal tiger walks through a shallow marshy pond in a grassy wetland safari habitat.
A wild Bengal tiger walks through a shallow marshy pond in a grassy wetland safari habitat.
Caption: Valmiki Tiger Reserve recorded 54 Bengal tigers (Panthera tigris) in 2022 — up from 8 in 2010. Behind that number: restored grasslands, controlled mining, recovering prey populations, and a corridor that was held together long enough to become a viable habitat for big cats.

Valmiki Tiger Reserve, Bihar — 2024
A wild Bengal tiger walks down a dirt road toward safari jeeps in a lush Indian forest.
A wild Bengal tiger walks down a dirt road toward safari jeeps in a lush Indian forest.
Caption: The Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris) held its line. The safari vehicles did not — closing in from both sides, the way they do across India's reserves when a sighting overrides everything else, including the animal's right to simply cross a road.

Kanha National Park, Madhya Pradesh — 2025
A smiling Asian farmer standing in a flooded green rice paddy field during planting season.
A smiling Asian farmer standing in a flooded green rice paddy field during planting season.
Caption: An Oraon farmer at Goilkera whose paddy yield tripled after simple interventions by the Tata Steel Foundation — better seeds, water management, land levelling. He started smiling while talking about it, mid-sentence, the way people do when the numbers are still surprising to them.

Goilkera Village, Jharkhand — 2021
Two bright green vine snakes coiled together on a tree branch in a tropical forest.
Two bright green vine snakes coiled together on a tree branch in a tropical forest.
Caption: Malabar green vine snakes (Ahaetulla malabarica) mating in the Chorla Ghats — the male smaller, positioned above the female, both still. This is among the rarest documented moments in Indian herpetology, not because the species is rare, but because this behaviour occurs deep in monsoon cover, at night, and is almost never witnessed.

Chorla Ghats, Goa — 2025
A small narrow-mouthed Bombay bush frog inflating its vocal sac while perched on a green leaf.
A small narrow-mouthed Bombay bush frog inflating its vocal sac while perched on a green leaf.
Caption: The Bombay bush frog (Raorchestes bombayensis) exists nowhere on earth except the Western Ghats. On a monsoon night, a male climbs into the low vegetation and calls. Somewhere in the dark, a probable mate is listening.

Chorla Ghats, Goa — 2025
A brown and tan patterned Malabar Pit Viper snake coiled around a tree branch in the rainforest.
A brown and tan patterned Malabar Pit Viper snake coiled around a tree branch in the rainforest.
Caption: The Malabar pit viper (Trimeresurus malabaricus) finds a position and waits — sometimes through an entire night — for one decisive strike. A heat-sensitive pit between its eye and nostril reads the dark better than any flashlight can.

Western Ghats, Goa — 2025
Two golden Hylarana frogs mating in amplexus position in a shallow muddy pond.
Two golden Hylarana frogs mating in amplexus position in a shallow muddy pond.
Caption: Caesar's goldenback frogs (Hylarana caesari) in amplexus as the monsoon breaks around them. In the Chorla Ghats, everything biological is organised around this season. Most of it goes completely unseen unless observed with a patient eye.

Chorla Ghats, Goa — 2025
Black and white photo of three smiling children looking out of a metal barred window in a white wall.
Black and white photo of three smiling children looking out of a metal barred window in a white wall.
Caption: Sukinda valley holds one of the world's largest chromite deposits and some of Odisha's highest school dropout rates. The Tata Steel Foundation's Thousand Schools Programme works at this intersection — bringing children back into classrooms in some of the most extraction-heavy landscapes in the country.

Sukinda, Odisha — 2022
A small shark caught as bycatch in a blue commercial fishing net.
A small shark caught as bycatch in a blue commercial fishing net.
Caption: The Spade-nose shark (Scoliodon laticaudus) is among the most commonly landed elasmobranchs on India's northwest coast — small, coastal, almost entirely unprotected. At Veraval it arrives as bycatch, having made the mistake of sharing water with more commercially valued species. It is rarely counted. It is rarely kept.

Veraval, Gujarat — 2022
Close-up black and white photo of an elephant eye showing wrinkled skin texture and detail.
Close-up black and white photo of an elephant eye showing wrinkled skin texture and detail.
Caption: Forty years of forest, held in a single eye.

Valmiki Tiger Reserve, Bihar — 2021
A majestic Bengal tiger prowls through a dense jungle forest with sunlight filtering through trees.
A majestic Bengal tiger prowls through a dense jungle forest with sunlight filtering through trees.
Caption: A Bengal tiger in the sal corridors of Kanha — unhurried, mouth slightly open, every sense trained forward. These are the moments that remind you the forest was his long before it was a reserve.

Kanha National Park, Madhya Pradesh — 2025
Workers in a lush green tea garden watch a wild elephant grazing near the trees.
Workers in a lush green tea garden watch a wild elephant grazing near the trees.
Extreme close-up of a large Asiatic elephant showing textured grey skin and ivory tusks.
Extreme close-up of a large Asiatic elephant showing textured grey skin and ivory tusks.
Caption: Two young kunki elephant brothers at Valmiki - trained for forest department operations, living at the precise edge of the wild and the managed.

Valmiki Tiger Reserve, Bihar
A mother Indian Gaur bison licking its two young calves in a golden grassy meadow.
A mother Indian Gaur bison licking its two young calves in a golden grassy meadow.
Caption: A gaur cow (Bos gaurus) nuzzles one of her two calves in the dry forest floor cover of Tadoba — a twinning event rare enough that most field researchers working large bovines across central India will never record one. The largest wild bovine on earth, and among its most quietly extraordinary moments.

Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve, Maharashtra — 2024
Caption: Tea estate workers at the edge of a plantation watch an elephant herd cross through; navigating a mosaic of hutments, tea rows, paddy edges and remnant forest that has become the only corridor still connecting two protected areas.

Biswanath Chiraili, Assam — 2021
A local fisherman in a lungi holds a large silver carp fish in a river.
A local fisherman in a lungi holds a large silver carp fish in a river.
Caption: An Oraon community member at Bodam holds the afternoon's biggest catch from a pond his family now farms under a Tata Steel Foundation pisciculture programme. Learning to farm fish changed what the pond could give — and what his family no longer needs to take from the market.

Bodam Village, Jharkhand — 2022
Two black-tailed godwits jumping and fighting over a lush green wetland field.
Two black-tailed godwits jumping and fighting over a lush green wetland field.
Caption: Two Black-tailed godwits (Limosa limosa) over Mangalajodi — a wetland on the Chilika riverine system that holds one of South Asia's largest concentrations of migratory waterbirds each winter. They have flown here from Siberia. The journey does not make them gentle.

Mangalajodi Wetlands, Odisha — 2024
A Common Cuckoo bird perched on a branch with a caterpillar in its beak.
A Common Cuckoo bird perched on a branch with a caterpillar in its beak.
Caption: A Common hawk-cuckoo (Hierococcyx varius) with a fresh catch at Kanha — a frame that belongs to those who come to the forest not only for the tiger, but to watch how the whole of it functions, and what it quietly offers.

Kanha National Park, Madhya Pradesh — 2025
A black and white close-up of a monkey's hand gripping a chain link fence in captivity.
A black and white close-up of a monkey's hand gripping a chain link fence in captivity.
Caption: A Gray langur (Semnopithecus entellus) grips the wire of its enclosure at the Tata Steel Zoological Park. Zoos hold their own argument about conservation. This photograph holds its own argument about zoos.

Jamshedpur, Jharkhand — 2022
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