Shruti Ravindran

In 2005, the World Health Organisation declared that leprosy had been effectively eradicated worldwide. But this “eradication” only conformed to an arbitrary definition they’d set for themselves a little over a decade before, which meant that its incidence had been driven down to less than a case per 10,000 people.

A mountain range about the size of Greece that runs down the western coast like a fleshy scar, the Western Ghats are a favorite destination for Indian taxonomists interested in discovering new species

One day in December 2013, Shivamallappa Basappa, a farmer from Chikkabaragi village in Karnataka, was returning home with his cows when a tiger attacked him and dragged him into the forest.