The humble aubergine has been the staple of Indian cuisine since antiquity. I can tell you that as I’ve grown up trying to avoid it, but eventually it just makes its way on your dinner plate if you spend time in India. The Americans, who like to call the aubergine ‘eggplant’ are trying to sell Bacillus thuringiensis (BT) bacterium Brinjal to Indians citing increased yields and the usual propaganda associated with genetically modified crops. Honestly though, anything injected with any kind of ‘bacterium’ doesn’t really sound safe, does it?

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Small islands bereft of mountains are going to sink beneath the waves as sea levels rise and for the millions of people living on them, climate change is not some distant, abstract concept but a concrete reality. As noted last week, the Sundarbans islands of India and Bangladesh have lost four islands completely. Sorry, 'lost' implies that they were carelessly misplaced behind a cupboard. 'Forcibly taken' would perhaps be more apt.

At the mouth of the Ganges River lies the Sundarbans - 20,000 square kilometres of Unesco protected mangrove forest stretching between India and Bangladesh. It is home to 500 endangered Bengali tigers, countless crocodiles and around 4.3 million people.

It's not just on this country that people get so riled about climate change that they're driven into taking drastic action, action such as, oh I don't know, climbing a chimney stack in a coal-fired power station.

A new series of videos from our Indian office (compiled into one above) showcases six activists who explain why they climbed the chimney at Kolaghat power station in October 2007 and spent a few days in jail after their arrest. Read more »

Reyes works for Greenpeace's Research Labratories and is normally based in Exeter but she's just begun a year long project working with our office in India. Reyes already wrote for the blog relay last month but we convinced her to write a monthly update about her adventures in India and here's her first update.

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Sea turtles have been nesting at Gahirmatha on the Orissa coast of India for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. But if we don't act now, we could see this change within a decade – an eye blink in geological timescales.

A new port being built at Dhamra, near Gahirmatha, will push the endangered olive ridley sea turtle closer to the slippery edge of extinction. The main threat to the turtles is posed by dredging to make a channel deep enough for large ships to anchor.

Tracy is on the Rainbow Warrior, which is in India to highlight the impacts of climate change and what we can do to stop it. You can follow all the tour updates on the Ban the Bulb blog, and we'll be posting tour highlights here.

We set off early for the southeast corner of Sagar Island, where the task today was to plant 8,000 mangrove seedlings along the shore to help hold back the advancing seas. This is an experimental plantation project started by Professor Sugata Hazra, head of oceanography at Jadhaupur University.

He says that the Sundarbans delta is already experiencing the worst of climate change. Sea levels are rising faster here than the global average and the intensity of cyclonic storms and monsoon rainfall has increased.

From the Rainbow Warrior, which is in India to highlight the impacts of climate change and what we can do to stop it. You can follow all the tour updates on the Ban the Bulb blog, and we'll be posting tour highlights here.

I've never wanted to be a celebrity, always loved my anonymity, so being welcomed to Sagar Island by 12,000 people was a bit overwhelming.

We sailed from Kolkata at three in the morning so by noon we were well down the Hugli and approaching the Bay of Bengal. The "meeting", as it was described to us, to welcome the Rainbow Warrior to Sagar Island was due to start in the early afternoon and the Warrior was still a few hours away. We launched two inflatable boats to take us to the northern tip of the island and we would go the rest of the way by jeep to beat the ship to the Sagar Ganges beach.

I'm in Calcutta! Wow, what a mad place - dodging traffic, choked pavements, goat herding in the city centre, streets filled with sleeping bodies at night, fantastic food, friendly people - it is a little overwhelming.

I'm here for the next month helping out the India office and I'll be joining the Rainbow Warrior when it arrives in Calcutta, or Kolkata as it is now known. We'll be sailing down the coast to look at the impacts of climate change and what can be done in India to stop it.

I arrived Sunday night and while I was sleeping off my jetlag the next morning, the local activists were up early and out for a swim in the Hoogly river. They tied more than 200 life rings together to spell "Ban the Bulb" to bring their bulb campaign to Kolkata. Now, I know that doesn't seem like a big deal, but the Hoogly makes the Thames look like a crystal clear spring. First there is the human waste, and if you can get past that, then you might run into the charred remains for someone's loved one who has been set to sea from up river, or if you're really unlucky - the not completely charred remains.

These are either some of the bravest, or the craziest, activists I've ever met. They've been for their shots now, but it will be a month before we know if they picked up anything other than local media coverage from the day. You can support them by emailing the Indian Minister of Power and asking him to take action.

Something that drives me nuts is when people use the example of developing economies such as China or India as an excuse for inactivity on climate change - the "what's the bloody point" argument, which insists that any savings we might make in CO2 emissions using renewables will be more than cancelled out by their use of dirty energy. It's not that there's not an element of truth in this - it's the refusal to recognise that we in the west have any influence or responsibility in the matter. After all, a key driver in India and China's rapid development is our insatiable demand for insanely cheap products - which forces them to use the clapped out and dirty technlogies we are trying to break away from.