RoundGlass Sustain
RoundGlass Sustain is an English-language digital platform based in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, publishing environment, wildlife and conservation journalism from across India. Operating as a not-for-profit social impact initiative of RoundGlass, it describes its purpose as documenting India's rich biodiversity to create a comprehensive record of its wildlife and habitats, presented as a media-rich digital encyclopedia of the species and ecosystems of India. Through films, photography, photo stories, infographics and written features produced with scientists, conservationists and local communities, the platform aims to bring India's wildlife and ecosystems to life for a global audience and to encourage readers and viewers to protect them.
The RoundGlass Context
RoundGlass Sustain is one of several initiatives created under RoundGlass by its founder, the entrepreneur and philanthropist Sunny Gurpreet Singh, whose work is organised around the idea of wholistic wellbeing. Within that family, RoundGlass works in areas including meditation and wellbeing content, sport through RoundGlass Sports and Punjab football, and community development in Punjab through the RoundGlass Foundation, which Singh started in 2018 to improve quality of life in underserved communities. Sustain is the environmental arm of this structure: where the foundation works on the ground in villages, Sustain works in media, growing respect and love of nature by showcasing the biodiversity of India. Its recognition has extended beyond India; in 2024 the United States Congressional Record, in remarks honouring Singh, noted that RoundGlass Sustain had worked to document biodiversity in India and had campaigned to promote environmental conservation through thousands of photos and videos that reached millions of people.
A Digital Encyclopedia of Indian Biodiversity
The platform's central project is cumulative documentation. By its own published figures, it has created more than 2,200 pieces of content on roundglasssustain.com, including around 200 videos in twelve languages, 150 photo stories and 220 infographics, alongside written articles. The multilingual video output is significant: conservation content in India reaches far more people when it is available in the languages of the regions where the wildlife actually lives, and producing films in twelve languages indicates an intent to serve local as well as national and international audiences. The encyclopedia model means individual pieces, a film about a wetland bird community, a photo story on a Himalayan mammal, an infographic explaining an ecosystem, accumulate into a reference record of Indian natural history that remains available and searchable over time.
Film Work
Film is the platform's most visible medium. RoundGlass Sustain commissions and supports filmmakers to tell conservation stories centred on species, habitats and the human communities living alongside them. Its film Wings of Hope, made with filmmaker Gunjan Menon, a National Geographic Storytelling Explorer, tells the story of the Menari community and its relationship with its birds and wetland; Menar was declared a wetland and nominated for Ramsar site status, and the film shows how the community pushed for conservation and change from within, taking ownership of its wetlands, patrolling against illegal hunting and building an eco-tourism model. The platform's explainers and series, such as its Bird's the Word series on how birds fly, feather design and identifying birds by their calls and songs, apply the same approach to natural history education, using accessible science communication to deepen viewers' connection with familiar species.
Supporting Filmmakers and Communities
Sustain's model is to back filmmakers, many of them women working in difficult field conditions, and connect their work to conservation outcomes. Reported examples include a filmmaker from Nainital who travelled to the Himalayas to document the endangered musk deer and the hunting pressures it faces from the trade in musk and bear bile; work in Singchung, Arunachal Pradesh, on the Bugun Liocichla, a bird found only there and scientifically documented as a new species in 2006; and a Kolkata filmmaker's project encouraging children in West Bengal to exchange catapults for cameras instead of taking part in an illegal ritual hunt of jungle cats, flying foxes, coucals, tortoises and vultures. In each case the film is not an end in itself: the initiative presents storytelling as an instrument that raises awareness, changes local behaviour and supports protection of wildlife on the ground.
Recognition
The platform's films have received international recognition. Wings of Hope won the audience award at the UN World Wildlife Day Film Showcase, where, among twenty-nine films curated and screened from across the globe, it stood out as the sole representative from India. Six RoundGlass Sustain films were also shortlisted from seven hundred films globally for the Science Film Festival organised by the Goethe-Institut, with the selected films shown in more than ten countries. Such selections place Indian conservation stories, often about little-known species and communities, before international audiences and juries, and they validate the platform's strategy of investing in high-quality filmmaking rather than only in short-form digital content.
Content Approach and Tone
The platform describes its content as fun, easy to understand and inspiring, created with scientists, conservationists and communities. Its goal, in its own words, is to help everyone feel closer to nature and take small steps to protect it, with storytelling that supports conservation by raising awareness. That tone distinguishes Sustain from conventional environmental news, which often leads with crisis and decline. While the threats it documents are real, from hunting and habitat loss to endangered species on the IUCN Red List, its characteristic mode is wonder and attachment: detailed attention to how a bird flies or sings, and to the human communities whose choices decide whether species survive.
Languages and Audiences
Publishing video in twelve languages, maintaining an active channel presence with series and explainers, and distributing films through international festivals gives RoundGlass Sustain three overlapping audiences: Indian viewers encountering their own country's wildlife, often for the first time in their own language; a global nature-documentary audience; and the conservation community itself, for whom the platform's record functions as documentation and advocacy. Its social channels carry the same mixture of films, photography and conversation, and its website gathers the full archive. For a Bengaluru-based platform, the subject matter is deliberately nationwide, spanning Himalayan, northeastern, central Indian, coastal and marine ecosystems, as in its films on the coringa mangroves of Andhra Pradesh and the grasslands of Manas in Assam.
Education and Engagement
Much of Sustain's output is designed as environmental education. Its explainer series break down animal behaviour and adaptation into short, structured lessons, explaining, for example, the science of bird flight, the functions of feathers and the practice of identifying birds by ear. Infographics condense ecological information into visual form, and photo stories use sequences of images to introduce species and habitats to readers who may never visit them. By working with scientists and conservationists in producing this material, the platform aims to keep its popular presentation accurate, and by distributing it freely online and through social channels, it makes natural history education available outside classrooms and paid documentary services, to anyone with an internet connection in India or elsewhere.
Place in Indian Environmental Media
India has a long tradition of nature writing and wildlife filmmaking, but dedicated, not-for-profit digital platforms devoted entirely to documenting the country's biodiversity are rare. RoundGlass Sustain occupies that space with institutional backing, a growing archive of more than two thousand pieces of content, and a record of international festival recognition. Its significance lies in the combination of scale and purpose: it is simultaneously a media outlet, an archive of Indian natural history, a funder and promoter of conservation filmmakers, and an advocacy instrument intended to convert attention into protection. As environmental journalism in India contends with shrinking space in general news media, Sustain demonstrates an alternative model in which a philanthropic initiative sustains specialist coverage of wildlife and ecosystems as a long-term public record.
