Parvat Say #17 | Art, Space, and Setting Foundations
Parvat Say is a newsletter bringing to you important news and perspectives, relating to Climate Finance and Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), from the Global South.
Parvat Say is a play on words. In Darjeeling, where we’re based out of, mountains are referred to as ‘Parvat.’ These dispatches are hence “From the Mountains.” They’re also a voice, putting to words the thoughts and ideas that are emanating from the mountains of Darjeeling, hence “the Mountains speak.”
📭 Introduction
Namaste.
On behalf of Alt Carbon, I wish you and your family a very Happy New Year.
We closed December by building key foundations for the year to come. From scaling Indra Dhanush, Chanakya, Shonku Labs and Climate Studio, we expanded our teams and grew as an organisation.
We scaled our tech stack — FELUDA — and had multiple dry runs at Shonku Labs, our R&D facilities inside the Indian Institute of Science. Hotruns, calibration, and early data filled the month with the sound of progress.
We also produced our first batch of biochar at our Nobojagoron plant!
🏔️ Latest at Alt Carbon:
Last month, Alt Carbon was invited to speak at DeCarbon Tokyo 2025.
With policy momentum building and corporate appetite growing for reliable credits, DeCarbon Tokyo 2025 brought together key players across the industry to dissect carbon market trends across Japan, the Asia-Pacific, and worldwide.
The Darjeeling Revival Project is a symphony of soil and science.
It’s a first-of-its-kind effort to unite climate action with cultural and ecological restoration. A coming together of deep tech and nature, cutting-edge algorithms and nature’s oldest healing method.
This is our flagship Enhanced Rock Weathering project, but more importantly, it's the story of our reviving Darjeeling’s tea estates. Click here to read this visual tale of hope and revival, designed by Climate Studio’s Chinmay and narrated by a 154-year-old house.
Art should not live behind glass. It should be something you can pick up, turn over in your hands, and mould it until it feels like yours. This past month, we conducted our first design hackathon—to create a poster for the new Alter Magazine essay on the development of India’s Space Tech industry.
Here’s the winning submission!
APJ Abdul Kalam on the coast of “the birthplace of Indian space-tech” — Thumba, walking towards the future of India’s space-tech industry.
🚀 Alter Magazine
Issue #2 of Alter Magazine is now live — How Did India Conquer Space?
We’re endlessly fascinated by space. Nothing illustrates the canvas for scientific progress quite like it. So when Khushi Mittal pitched us this piece, we were beyond thrilled.
The essay covers enormous ground, going from JFK’s speech that turned NASA into the most ambitious organisation in the world, to Pakistan launching the Rehbar-1, to Vikram Sarabhai and his dreamers at Thumba, all the way to today, when India boasts of more than 200 space-tech startups like Skyroot and Pixxel. To know more, click here.
This is the story of how India’s spacefaring ambitions leaped from scarcity to abundance. You can read it here.
Folks at Pixxel were kind enough to host the launch event at their Spacecraft Manufacturing Facility. Kshitij and Khushi hosted a lovely fireside chat, where they spoke about their respective journeys as founders aiming for the sky. We also had Devmalya and Samay join Khushi for a panel discussion on innovation, deep-tech, and the early-stage founder experience.
Panel with Devmalya Biswas (HyPrix), Khushi Mittal (Aspera Industries) and Samay Sanghvi (Alteon) (L to R)
🌎 In the World of Climate:
Australia will soon receive the world’s first officially recognised climate refugees—from Tuvalu. The Falepili Union Treaty grants Australian residency to 280 Tuvaluans every year.
Falepili (or fale pili) is a Tuvaluan term for looking after your neighbour.
“The tiny country of 11,000 people, perched halfway between Australia and Hawaii, represents a test case for how governments will respond as climate change drives displacement.”
Read the full story here.
Frontier has signed an agreement with NULIFE GreenTech to remove 122,000 tons of CO₂ between 2026 and 2030.
Many agricultural and industrial sites produce raw biowaste—grease, sludge, oat hulls, etc. It is firstly, a logistical nightmare to haul. Left in piles or spread on fields, biowaste releases greenhouse gases on decomposition.
NULIFE’s hydrothermal liquefaction turns biowaste into a dense bio-oil, which is then stored in underground caverns for long-term removal. The liquid is also easier to transport, enabling scale across geography.
NULIFE's method of removing CO₂ via hydrothermal liquefaction and underground injection. In 2025, we inaugurated Alt Carbon’s Bengal Renaissance Project’s pilot facility Nobojagoron with a similar focus on permanence, where agricultural waste is converted into biochar—a stable form of carbon designed to remain locked away for centuries.
🔖 Good Reads From India
Delhi’s winter smog has a familiar source: crop burning.
India generates nearly 600 million tonnes of agricultural residue each year, much of it burned in the open—fueling North India’s annual air-quality crisis.
But we might have a promising solution for productively utilising agricultural waste: CSIR scientists have developed bio-bitumen, converting crop residue into road-building material and reducing the need for open burning. You can read the full article here.
The same principle is at work in Alt Carbon’s Bengal Renaissance Project. At Nobojagoron, our pilot biochar facility, agricultural waste is utilised to produce biochar, locking away carbon dioxide for a long time while keeping residue out of the fire.
In 2024, climate disasters uprooted 45 million people. The choice between braving deadly heat and losing family income is the hardest for women in developing countries, 92% of whom work in the informal economy.
In India, a local women’s trade union—SEWA—has designed an innovative insurance model that allows workers to stay safe without sacrificing income. You can read a report from ClimateWorks here.
🛋️ What We’re Reading
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
A lone astronaut wakes up light-years from Earth, memory erased, tasked with saving humanity. It’s a love letter to problem‑solving—propelled by chemistry, humour, and one unforgettable alien friendship.
Written as a sequel to The Martian, this book builds on Andy Weir’s sci-fi style of resourceful, isolated astronauts solving crises.
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
This is a stunning collection of nine stories that tug at the boundaries of physics, free will, time travel, memory, and the meaning of life. Each story feels like a thought experiment, as if Chiang is probing the reader to think of paths they’d take when faced with a set of circumstances.
Highly recommend!
🌱 Abundance Index
Author Leah Zani was fascinated by a sideyard garden in her childhood. She saw corn husks and potatoes, and wondered—how did the world grow?
In this essay, Leah Zani argues that we’ve inherited this beauty from plants, who paint with fruits and smell.
Interplanetary life is a sure-shot conversation sparker in any group of the scientifically curious. It’s been discussed in scientific communities for decades. But that conversation has hardly gone beyond curiosity and moonshot ideas. Not anymore.
Read the full story—spanning curiosity, entrepreneurship, and astrobiology’s modern evolution—here.
According to energy think tank Ember, renewable energy has surpassed coal as a source of electricity worldwide.
In 2004, it took the world a full year to install 1 gigawatt of solar power capacity. Today, twice that amount goes online each day.
China is setting the pace for technological prowess powering a cleaner world. This year, renewables helped bring the growth of greenhouse emissions to a virtual standstill in China. Read the full article here.
That’s a wrap from me. ✌️
To discuss Planetary Intelligence hit me up at sparsh@alt-carbon.com