“Prakruti badaluchi (Nature is changing).”

This is the common consensus among locals in rural Odisha. Terms like ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ have yet to enter their everyday lexicon, as content creator Soumya Ranjan Sahoo (26) remarked during the time he spent with them, attempting to document their stories. When he asked them where they were drawing their conclusions from, they invited him for lunch.

In rural India, his hosts explained, the thali (food platter) is a canvas; it reflects the tangible impact of atmospheric shifts. While once, violets and greens and reds danced across the table — credit goes to the varied seasonal produce — now it’s just monochromes.

“The locals told me that seasonal vegetables are no longer available in the markets,” says Soumya, whose growing-up years in Sambalpur, Odisha, have given him a sound sense of local produce. “Not only are the seasons delayed, they say, but even when they do arrive, they lack their characteristics; it rains in winter, summers are unbearably hot, and monsoons often pause to make way for ‘a summer’ in between.”

In the cities, we call this global warming, a reality that the United Nations is racing against time to cap at 1.5 degrees Celsius, a threshold which, once crossed, could “unleash far more severe climate change impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves, and rainfall”. The people across India’s rural pockets have a bone to pick with it; the shifting seasons have heralded uncertainty into their lives. But it’s the paddy farmers who bear the brunt — rice covers 69 percent of the cultivable area; unseasonal rains incapacitate their farming patterns. “The harvest these days is less than half of what they previously achieved,” Soumya shares.

One thing is clear: despite India’s hinterland experiencing some semblance of a climate crisis, many lack the vocabulary to articulate it. And it is not their fault, says Jagadish Thaker, a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia, and principal investigator of a 2023 survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC), which indicated that more than 90 percent of Indians are concerned about global warming.

In his opinion, “a lack of awareness doesn’t mean people are not worried about it [climate change]. It means that they don’t know that it is called global warming and that it is caused by human activities.”

But bridging this ecological literacy chasm are youth like Soumya, who are venturing into the fringes of Odisha armed with cameras and ideas. Their content is rooted in native script to help India’s hinterland verbalise the realities unfolding in the fields and on their tables.

The creators are backed by Momentum Shifts, a Bengaluru-based initiative building citizen-facing narratives for system changes, which believes in tailor-made content and humour being channelled into tackling ecological issues.

From portable refrigerators to solar-powered homes

Think of the tumba as an eco-friendly refrigerator, Soumya urges. The traditional vessel chiselled out of bottle gourd — not the usual slender ones, but imagine one comparable to the size of a man’s head — is popular among the Chuktia Bhunjia tribe in the Sunabeda Wildlife Sanctuary of Nuapada district in Odisha. The bottle gourd, harvested around once a year, is left to dry completely, then hollowed out before it doubles up as a refrigerator for transporting water. It keeps the water chilled, despite the scorching heat. Other times, the tumba acts as a seed storage.

“This is a great innovation,” Soumya acknowledges. “But when people wonder why the tumba isn’t popular across Odisha, it’s because to make it, you need a bottle gourd of a certain size. These days, with modern farming techniques, the gourds do not grow as big.” Soumya intended for his reel to........

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