Like every year-end, we are now ready to roll our the finalists of this year’s Nature India photo contest.
In it’s fourth year, the photo contest continued to receive fantastic response with entries from around the world. The theme this year was ‘Grand Challenges’, and needed more thought and creativity than our earlier themes.
Despite the challenge, the quality and novelty of some of the entries has been breathtaking. We have had a mix of amateur and professional photographers, scientists and non-scientists, mobile cameras and high-end DSLRs — all vying to portray the complex global problems we face — the world’s grand challenges — and to look for solutions for a healthy and sustainable future.
Tough job as usual for the Nature India editorial and design team in selecting just three winners. The winners stand a chance of seeing their entries grace the cover page of one of our forthcoming print publications. The winner and two runners-up will receive a copy of the latest Nature India Special Annual Volume and an enviable bag of goodies from Springer Nature.
As a run up to the final announcement, we will be rolling out the top 10 finalists of the photo competition (in no particular order of merit) over the next few days on the Indigenus blog as well as our social media platforms (Twitter and Facebook). The final results will be announced somewhere in late December 2017.
So here’s Nature India photo contest 2017 finalist number one:
Owais Rashid Hakiem, PhD student, National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi.
Photo caption: The glorious dead lake
{credit}Owais Rashid Hakiem{/credit}
Owais Rashid Hakiem
This is how Owais describes his entry:
Dal lake in Srinagar, the summer capital of the state of Jammu and Kashmir in India, has a shoreline of about 15.5 km. Dal used to be a breathtaking freshwater lake till a couple of decades back. Now the capital city empties its wastes into it. Illegal floating gardens and inland farming have added to the lake’s woes. The Indian government has made massive investments (approximately US$275 million) to restore the lake’s original splendor. But poor accountability shows in the declining health of the lake.
Shakil Ahmad Romshoo, head of the Earth Sciences Department at Kashmir University says 32% of the lake is severely degraded, 48% suffers medium degradation and about 20% is relatively clean. The lake, which has shrunk from 31 to 24 square km between the years 1859 and 2014 faces multiple pressures from unplanned urbanisation, high population growth, nutrient load from intensive agriculture and tourism.
Congratulations Owais for making it to top ten!
Nature India’s final decision to chose the winner will be partly influenced by the engagement and reception he/she receives here at the Indigenus blog, on Twitter and on Facebook. To give all finalists a fair chance, we will take into consideration the social media engagement of each picture only during the first seven days of its announcement.
So watch out for our other finalists and feel free to promote, share and like your favourite entries with the hashtag #NatureIndphoto.
