Society
When Pollinators Vanish, Children Go Hungry—Here’s the Proof
A landmark study has, for the first time, traced a direct line from the collapse of wild insect pollinators to the malnutrition and poverty of farming families — reframing biodiversity loss as a global public health emergency.
Two billion. That is how many people on this planet eat what smallholder farmers grow. Not what agri-industrial combines harvest, not what commodity markets trade — what families with small plots of land pull from the soil, season after season, with the tools and seeds and knowledge they have. Two billion people. And a significant share of what keeps those harvests coming, what puts vitamins into the food and income into the household, has no name on any payroll, files no tax return, and has never once been thanked.
It is insects. Wild insects — bees, hoverflies, moths, beetles — moving flower to flower across millions of smallholder fields, doing work that no machine replicates and no subsidy replaces. Pollinator decline is dismantling that system quietly, field by field, season by season. A study published today in Nature, led by researchers at the University of Bristol, has for the first time traced exactly what that loss costs — not in abstracted ecosystem valuations, but in the vitamin A missing from a child’s diet, in the folate a pregnant woman never gets, in the farm income that does not arrive at the end of a harvest. The number at the end of that calculation is not a projection or a model. It is a measurement. And it is arresting.
Insect pollinators, the study found, are responsible for 44% of the farming income of the households tracked, and contribute more than 20% of dietary intake of vitamin A, folate and vitamin E — three nutrients whose deficiency is already linked to stunted child growth, weakened immunity and higher rates of disease. When pollinators vanish, the families don’t just grow less food. They grow less nutritious food, earn less money and become more vulnerable to illness. The cycle reinforces itself, downward.
Ten Villages, One Year, and a Chain of Evidence
The study centred on ten smallholder farming villages and their surrounding landscapes in Nepal. Over the course of a year, the research team — drawn from universities and non-governmental organisations across Nepal, the United Kingdom, the United States and Finland — tracked three things simultaneously: which insects were visiting which crops, what those crops yielded and how nutritious they were, and what the farming families were actually eating and earning.
It is, in structural terms, the kind of study that is very hard to pull off. Most research on pollinators stops at the field boundary — counting bee visits, measuring fruit set, estimating yield differentials. This one kept going, all the way to the dinner table and the household ledger. That continuity of evidence is what makes it significant.
The picture that emerged was not abstract or statistical. It was human. Over half the children in the study villages were too short for their age — a condition that goes by the clinical name of stunting and signals not just poor growth but compromised brain development, reduced immunity and diminished life prospects. The underlying cause, as the researchers documented it, was diet. And that diet depended, in ways the families could not easily see or control, on the insects working their fields.
Pollinator Decline: The Hidden Hunger Nobody Is Counting
There is a term in public health circles for the condition that the Nepal families illustrate: hidden hunger. It describes not the obvious, acute starvation that makes headlines, but the chronic, silent insufficiency of vitamins and minerals that undermines health even when enough calories are being consumed. A quarter of the global population currently suffers from it. It is, by most measures, one of the largest sources of preventable illness on the planet, and it is almost entirely invisible in the way society keeps score of environmental damage.
When a species goes extinct, when a forest is cleared, when an insect population crashes — the accounting of loss is typically measured in biodiversity metrics, in ecosystem service valuations, or in the emotional register of what is no longer there to see. It is almost never measured in folate deficiency, in children’s height-for-age charts, in the likelihood of a farming family falling into debt after a bad harvest.
That is what this study changes. It is not the first to establish that pollinator decline matters for nutrition in the abstract. But it is the first to demonstrate, with tracked data from real communities over a real year, the size and mechanism of the effect — and to show that the effect flows not just through calories but through the specific micronutrients that are hardest to replace.
Biodiversity as Medicine
Planetary Health — the field Dr Myers directs at Johns Hopkins — proceeds from a deceptively simple premise: human health and ecological health are not separate subjects. They are the same subject, studied from different ends. The degradation of natural systems is not a background condition to human development; it is one of the primary mechanisms by which human health is undermined.
That claim has long had intuitive force. What the Bristol study on pollinator decline provides is something more demanding: empirical evidence at the household level. It is one thing to argue that biodiversity loss will eventually compromise food security in a generalised way. It is another to show, village by village, season by season, that the decline in the bee community visiting a particular set of crops reduces particular vitamins in particular families’ diets by a measurable amount.
The phrasing matters. Biodiversity is not a luxury. In policy conversations, the language of luxury — or alternatively, of long-term concern — has frequently served to push ecological questions down the agenda. If the relationship between pollinator health and child health is as direct as this study finds, that framing becomes harder to sustain.
What Goes When the Bees Go
It is worth being specific about the nutritional stakes. Vitamin A deficiency impairs vision, particularly in low light, and compromises the immune system’s ability to fight infections that would otherwise be routine. Folate deficiency during pregnancy causes neural tube defects in developing foetuses, among other effects. Vitamin E is a key antioxidant, and its deficiency is associated with neurological damage and weakened immune function. These are not marginal health concerns. They sit near the top of the global burden of preventable disease.
The crops most dependent on animal pollination — fruits, many vegetables, pulses — are also, not coincidentally, among the most concentrated sources of these particular nutrients. A diet from which pollinator-dependent produce has been reduced or removed can look adequate in calorie terms while being profoundly inadequate in micronutrient terms. The families studied in Nepal were, in effect, already living that deficit, in a context where pollinator diversity is declining.
Globally, insect populations have been under sustained pressure for decades. Pesticide use, habitat loss, monoculture farming, climate change and artificial light at night have all been implicated in declines that researchers have called, in some cases, ecological collapse. The mechanisms are various; the direction of travel is consistent.
The Good News: Reversible by Design
The research is, in its implications, genuinely alarming. But the researchers are also at pains to emphasise something that is easy to miss in the headline findings: the relationship between pollinators and nutrition runs in both directions. If pollinator decline causes nutritional harm, pollinator recovery can produce nutritional gains. And the actions required are not exotic.
Planting wildflowers at field margins. Reducing pesticide inputs. Keeping native bee colonies. These are the kinds of changes that do not require new technology or large capital investment. They require farmers to understand what is happening in their fields at a level of detail most have not previously been given reason to consider. The researchers are already working on that — translating their findings into practical guidance and working with local organisations, government partners and farmers in Nepal to implement changes on the ground.
The approach is now informing Nepal’s emerging National Pollinator Strategy, an effort to make pollinator-friendly practices a standard part of everyday agriculture rather than a specialist conservation concern. The researchers report that farmers who have adopted even modest changes are already seeing improvements in crop yields, income and nutrition — a feedback loop that runs in the direction of health rather than away from it.
A Framework That Travels
Nepal is not an isolated case. Two billion people around the world depend on smallholder farming. Many of them face the same combination of circumstances: high dependence on pollinator-sensitive crops, limited dietary alternatives, micronutrient deficiencies that are already entrenched and ecosystems under stress. The findings from ten Nepali villages do not translate automatically to every agricultural context, but the framework — the method of tracing connections from insects to income to nutrition — does.
Diets even in industrialised countries still depend on pollinators and the ecosystems that sustain global agriculture. The buffer of wealth — the ability to import, substitute, supplement — is larger in wealthy countries, but it is not unlimited, and it does not protect the most economically vulnerable people even within those countries.
The lesson from this research on pollinator decline is less a specific warning about Nepal and more a methodological call to arms: to start measuring the connections that have, until now, been assumed or asserted but rarely demonstrated. When those connections are demonstrated, the case for protecting what remains of insect diversity becomes something different — not a moral preference or an aesthetic value, but a documented precondition for human health.
The Stakes
A quarter of the world’s people are living with hidden hunger. Over half the children in ten Nepali villages are stunted. Forty-four percent of the farming income in those communities flows, invisibly, through the wings of insects that nobody counted or protected until researchers started looking. The insects are in decline.
The study’s authors are careful, as scientists should be, to describe what they found and what it implies rather than what must be done. But the shape of the implication is not obscure. The fabric of life — the phrase Dr Myers uses — is not an abstraction. It is the thing that puts vitamins in a child’s diet and money in a family’s pocket. Tear large enough holes in it, and the consequences are not primarily ecological. They are medical. They are economic. They are, in the most direct sense, human. That’s why the new findings on pollinator decline matter.
The bees were always doing the work. We just weren’t watching closely enough to see it — or to understand what we stood to lose.
Society
Digital Detox: Why Taking a Break From Screens Matters
A digital detox can help children and adults reduce screen dependence, reconnect with nature and relationships, and create space for reflection and creativity.
Society
When a Village Walks Together, Even Drought Is Defeated. How Halma Breathed Life Back into Kesarpura’s Pond
How a traditional Halma brought Kesarpura villagers together to restore a pond, strengthen water security and revive community-led conservation.
About 22 kilometres from the Petlawad block headquarters in Jhabua district of Madhya Pradesh, the village of Kesarpura has a story to tell, one about the confidence of an entire community. A Halma was held here on 19 May 2026, and what followed convinced the village that the solution it had long sought from outside had been within it all along.
Halma is a word from the Bhili dialect, often translated as a “call for help”, and it means collective voluntary labour. When a family in the Bhil community is weighed down by a burden, whether raising a house, bringing in a harvest or facing a calamity, the word goes round the village and people come, unpaid and with their own tools, to stand by them. The message is simple: you are not alone. In Jhabua the tradition has also been turned to the work of saving water. Since 2009 the local organisation Shivganga has organised large Halmas for soil and water conservation, and one in February 2020 drew some 20,000 people from about 500 villages.
Kesarpura’s only pond had been waiting for exactly this tradition. Years of neglect had left it so choked with silt and weeds that its depth was shrinking, and so was its capacity to hold water. Seepage through one stretch of the embankment quietly drained away the rainwater it collected. This is a tribal district, where Scheduled Tribes made up about 87 per cent of the population at the 2011 Census, and a hilly one: as the district administration itself notes, water runs off the slopes instead of being held by the soil, so even good rainfall can leave villages short of water. In such a landscape a failing pond meant a direct threat to a full year of farming and to the water that livestock depend on. As summer set in, the pond bed would fill with cracks, and the village’s hopes would drain away with it.
Before the Halma: a dry pond bed, heaps of silt and seepage along the embankment. Photo: Mukesh Porwal, Block Facilitator, VAAGDHARA
The village knew the problem was big, but it also knew the solution lay in its own hands. With the support of the Gram Swaraj Samuh, a village self-governance group of ten women and ten men formed by VAAGDHARA, it was decided that a Halma would be held at the pond. The idea was not new to the area: less than a fortnight earlier, on 6 May, villagers of Borpada, also in Petlawad, had used a Halma to clear a silted public well after repeated appeals to the panchayat brought no result. On the morning of 19 May, Kesarpura showed its true strength.
It began not with speeches or formal announcements but with the beat of the dhol, kundi and thali. A rally wound through the village. Children ran ahead carrying a banner that read “Traditional Halma Method,” with the slogan beneath it: “Save water regularly, and the future is secure.” Behind them walked elders, youth and women, with someone from every household carrying a pickaxe, a spade or a metal pan.
The rally sets out to the beat of the dhol and thali, with a banner reading “Traditional Halma Method”; enthusiastic children lead the way. Photo: Mukesh Porwal, Block Facilitator, VAAGDHARA
Around 150 people gathered at the pond for the Halma. There is no attendance register and no list; people come of their own accord and leave having done more than they thought they could. Under the blazing sun, heads were covered with gamchas and dupattas, yet faces glowed instead of showing fatigue. The work divided itself. Some waded into the pond to cut the weeds, others dug out silt with pickaxes and spades, and the silt was loaded into pans and basins and handed to a long line of women. The pans passed from hand to hand and head to head, and the silt made its way out of the pond.
Men wielding pickaxes and spades on the pond bed, while women stand in line holding pans. Photo: Mukesh Porwal, Block Facilitator, VAAGDHARA
The role of women was the most remarkable part of the scene. Amid their household responsibilities, they stayed at the pond all day. Recalling that day, Basanti Ninama says that when the dhol sounded she could not sit at home, and standing in line with a pan on her head, it felt like work in her own courtyard.
“I was tired, but my heart felt light. I felt I was doing something for my village.”
– Basanti Ninama
Everyone also worked together to pile soil on the embankment where water had been seeping out, pressing it down and strengthening it. Clearing silt and weeds and strengthening the earthen bund are the standard steps in restoring a village pond, and those who know water conservation understand that the strength of the embankment and the depth of the pond decide how long a water body lasts. When noon came, the tools were set down, but the bond of togetherness did not break. Lunch, too, was cooked by everyone together on the pond’s bank. The women wove plates from tree leaves, and then everyone sat in a long row on colourful mats. An elderly woman and a small child ate the same meal on the same mat, and the true meaning of Halma came alive right there. Here, trust takes the place of accounts, and hard work and celebration blend into one another.
Women making leaf plates: even the preparation of the meal was a collective effort. Photo: Mukesh Porwal, Block Facilitator, VAAGDHARA
The simplicity of the leaf plate is a lesson in itself. A plate made from tree leaves leaves no plastic waste and needs no water for washing. Leaf plates have long been part of community feasts across India, and researchers describe them as a renewable alternative to plastic disposables. At an event whose very purpose is to save water, this goes beyond symbolism and becomes practice. Traditions often carry such eco-friendly solutions quietly, without any announcement.
Those who restored the pond that day included Basanti Ninama, Ganga Ninama, Surta Ninama, Sundar Mavi, Anadu Maida, Devli Mori, Phula Katara, Seema Maida, Anita Katara, Kala Ninama, Sukhram Maida, Ukarlal Maida, Mansingh Ninama, Ukar Ninama, Laxman Ninama, Dilip Vasuniya, Gendu Mori, Khima Mori, Anil Maida and Sunil Katara. Though they differ in age and family, their experiences seem threaded on a single string. For Ganga Ninama it was an emotional day: generations of her family have drunk this pond’s water, and it pained her to see it buried under silt.
“The day the pond was cleaned, I felt we had repaid our debt.” – Ganga Ninama
For men like Sukhram Maida and Anil Maida, the experience changed the way they thought. They used to believe that work on the pond was the government’s job, but on the day of the Halma they realised that when a village comes together, it has no one to wait for. “Before the Halma, we thought the government would do this work. This time we understood that when the village becomes one, we don’t have to wait for anyone.” – Anil Maida. The thought was not unique to Kesarpura: at the Samuh meeting in Borpada, someone had remarked that waiting for the government could cost another three years.
“It was very hot, but nobody complained. We want our children to see how work for the village is done.” – Devli Mori
During the event, Paramesh Patidar, Implementation Leader at VAAGDHARA, spoke with the villagers and explained that Halma is not merely voluntary labour but a tradition of standing by one another in joy and sorrow and sharing collective responsibility.
Behind the scenes, Block Facilitator Mukesh Porwal and his team also played a vital role, working at every level from mobilising people to planning the work. The steady guidance of Team Leader Dharmendrasingh Chunawat gave direction to the entire effort.
After the Halma the village returned to its routine, but nobody expected the result to show so soon. The monsoon turned out weaker than hoped. The India Meteorological Department had forecast a below-normal season, and by late July Jhabua was among the Madhya Pradesh districts reporting rainfall 33 to 45 per cent below normal; by 9 September the district’s shortfall stood at about 36 per cent. There was every fear that the pond would once again be left only partly filled. But about three months later, around August 2026, when villagers looked towards the pond, it was filled to the brim with water.
Where dust once flew, calm water now stretches far into the distance; the green grass sprouting along the edge is proof of life’s return. Photo: Mukesh Porwal, Block Facilitator, VAAGDHARA
The greatest joy was that the seepage through the embankment had also stopped. The water that came had stayed. For farmers like Sunil Katara and Mansingh Ninama, the meaning was direct: their fields will get irrigation and their cattle will have drinking water.
It is worth asking why such ponds last. Studies of India’s water infrastructure describe a recurring cycle of construction, neglect and rebuilding, with upkeep after construction as the weak link, and village ponds that were once maintained by the communities who used them fell into disrepair as that responsibility moved elsewhere. Experience shows that when a water structure is built from outside by a contractor, its upkeep often becomes nobody’s responsibility; the embankment breaks, the silt returns, and within a few years the pond can be back to its old state. A structure built through voluntary labour creates an emotional bond. Someone who has put soil into it with their own hands cannot bear to see it deteriorate. This is Halma’s greatest invisible achievement: along with the structure, it raises a whole generation of guardians. One good season in a poor monsoon is encouraging, but it is early evidence rather than proof; how long the pond lasts will depend on the desilting and embankment care the village now commits to.
The hopes ahead are considerable. In the rabi season, when fields need water the most, this stored water can become the farmers’ mainstay. With water standing in the pond, groundwater levels in nearby wells and hand pumps may also improve; case studies of desilted village ponds in Maharashtra’s Marathwada region report that nearby borewells recharged and the irrigated area grew in both the kharif and rabi seasons. Greenery is returning to the embankment, and guarding it is now the village’s shared responsibility. Remove the silt, bind the embankment, hold the rain, raise the groundwater, then irrigate the fields: this entire cycle of water conservation now appears to be complete in Kesarpura.
Greenery on the strengthened embankment, with still water on one side. Photo: Mukesh Porwal, Block Facilitator, VAAGDHARA
One sees the tradition of the elders and the labour of the young, the support of women and families, and above all a collective resolve to do something for one’s own village.
Kesarpura’s story is a reminder that development does not always wait for help from outside. In a country where, by NITI Aayog’s 2018 assessment, some 600 million people face high to extreme water stress, and where even large investments in water structures struggle with upkeep once they are built, examples like this show that the key often lies in local knowledge and community ownership. Three things together have given this pond a new lease of life: tradition meeting present-day need, institutions staying in the role of facilitators (in Borpada, too, the Samuh gave villagers room to decide for themselves rather than handing them ready-made answers), and a village that regards its resource as its own. Halma did not remove only silt and weeds from Kesarpura’s pond; it rekindled hope in people’s hearts, and today that hope is as clear as the pond’s water.
Society
India to Push Indian Sign Language Into Everyday Life
From an ISL rendition of Vande Mataram to school lessons, books and digital learning, new initiatives are widening the place of Indian Sign Language in everyday life for deaf people.
When Vande Mataram was presented in Indian Sign Language (ISL) at this year’s Sign Language Day event in New Delhi, it was more than a ceremonial performance. It showed how a familiar part of public life can be made accessible through a visual language. But the larger story lies elsewhere. Alongside the ISL rendition, the event brought out a range of new resources, for young children, school students, readers, teachers, interpreters and people accessing educational content online. Together, they point to an effort to take ISL beyond specialised spaces and into more routine parts of life.
India had about 50.7 lakh people with hearing disability, according to the 2011 Census. The figure includes people who were deaf as well as those with difficulty hearing. The Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities (DEPwD) has called for ISL to become part of “everyday citizenship”, so that deaf people can take part in public life without communication barriers, said Additional Secretary Manmeet Kaur Nanda.
A Child’s First Lessons
Some of the new material begins at the earliest stage of education. “Sanket Vatika” visual books have been introduced for children aged 3–6. There is also new teaching material for courses that prepare ISL interpreters and teachers. For schoolchildren, ISL videos now cover content from 14 textbooks for Classes 1–6. The material includes 100 personalised adaptive learning videos. Concept-based videos have also been prepared for Classes 9–12.
The idea is to build resources across different stages of schooling rather than leave gaps as children move from one level to another.
More Than Classroom Material
The move into ISL is also reaching books. Three hundred National Book Trust titles have been made accessible in ISL. They include stories, biographies and historical accounts.
The ISL Dictionary has also been expanded into 11 more languages. The stated goal is to eventually cover all 22 Scheduled Languages. For a language to be used widely, its vocabulary has to travel with it. The expansion of the dictionary is one part of that process.
Taking ISL to the Screen
ISL content is now being live-streamed through PM e-Vidya Channel 31 using direct encoder-based streaming. That puts educational material in a format that deaf viewers can access through a dedicated ISL channel, rather than having to rely only on spoken content.
Digital resources and translated material cannot cover every interaction. There is still a need for people who can interpret between ISL and spoken languages. At the event, DEPwD Joint Secretary Rajeev Sharma spoke about the growing demand for ISL interpreters across different fields.
The new teaching material for the Diploma in Indian Sign Language Interpretation and Diploma in Teaching Indian Sign Language courses is part of this effort. It points to a practical challenge: making information available in ISL is one part of access. Having enough trained people to support communication is another.
What this Looks Like in Ordinary Life
The ISL version of Vande Mataram may have been one of the more visible moments at the event. But the changes taking place in classrooms, books and digital learning are closer to the everyday experience of deaf people.
For a young child, it could mean learning a new word from a picture book in ISL. For a student, it could mean following a lesson in a language they understand. For a reader, it could mean picking up a story, biography or history book in ISL. And for someone who needs to communicate directly, it could mean having an interpreter to help bridge the conversation.
Taken together, these efforts are about making ISL useful beyond a classroom or a special occasion, as a language through which deaf people can learn, read, find information and take part in public life. That is what this year’s Sign Language Day, themed “Declaring Deaf People’s Human Rights”, sought to put into focus.
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