India Calls its Grasslands “Wastelands”; it’s a ₹1.3 lakh Crore Mistake!

The Morning Brief · Dec 25, 2025 · 20m

Half your milk comes from animals grazing on land the government calls wasteland. The mutton in your biryani? Same story. We're talking ₹1.3 lakh crore annually 5% of India's GDP built on ecosystems we've systematically mislabeled as worthless since the British needed a tax category for "land we can't monetize. Now we're converting these "wastelands" into solar farms at scale without asking the millions of pastoralists who depend on them, or calculating the carbon stored beneath them, or wondering what happens when milk and meat prices spike because we've paved over the free grazing grounds…