World Wildlife Day: How Krithi Karanth Is Transforming Conservation In India

That childhood experiences and influences can shape one라이브 바카라 future destiny is a well acknowledged fact but the extent of it varies in each case. For wildlife conservationist and environmental scientist Krithi Karanth, the countless hours spent in Nagarahole and Bandipur national parks atop jeeps and machaans as a child and a silent observer, often bored to tears, have now come back to define the way she utilizes every minute of her waking time today.

As the only child of two unconventional, intellectually curious and highly qualified parents, Krithi didn’t have to attain any of the usual milestones that ambitious middle class Indian parents tend to impose and was free to explore and shape her own trajectory. “I was only required to find a career that I was deeply passionate about and that left a mark on society”, says Krithi.

Unlike many typical middle class parents, finding her true vocation and developing it into a fulfilling career was the only expectation placed on her.

Moreover, closely observing her father라이브 바카라 efforts had exposed her to the harsher side of conservation work, where many questioned and doubted even the best intentions. Growing up and watching law and crime inspired TV shows, Krithi mostly imagined herself pursuing law as a career, hoping to find passion for a field she thought fitted the other criteria she was expected to meet, quite far away from the world of jungles, tigers and human-animal conflicts. She might work on conflict resolution, but of a vastly different kind.

With her mother, a professor who travelled a fair bit for her work, Krithi ended up spending long hours in jungles where she watched her father studying, collaring and camera trapping tigers at a time when none of the equipment, rigorous tools and technology available today to do this existed. She would be handed a pair of binoculars with instructions to keep silent, spot animals before her father did and remembers spending hours identifying unique tigers from albums full of hundreds of photos of similar looking ones! It was not the conventional childhood most urban children experienced.

Towards the end of her school years, Krithi began to develop an interest in biology and geography and, encouraged by her father who felt academics in the US was the ideal place to discover your true interests, made her way to the University of Florida, where she pursued and earned degrees in Environmental Science and in Geography, as a Summa Cum Laude (the highest distinction).

It was here that she struck gold, so to speak. Her academic mentor and guide at the University helped her get plugged into a fascinating research project documenting the change in forest cover in Thailand over the decades using satellite imagery, a project that led her to understand the requirements of producing good research, analysing and applying it to effect changes on the ground while learning how technology can play a critical role. It also helped her achieve absolute clarity on what she wanted to pursue so she applied and managed to get into Yale for a Master라이브 바카라, considered among the best schools to pursue her interests.

It was her Master라이브 바카라 at Yale, doctorate at Duke and her post-doctoral fellowship at Columbia that set the tone for her to return to India so that she could apply her learnings and expertise to make a difference in India라이브 바카라 growing conservation efforts and landscape.

Her doctorate required her to take a deep dive into 150 years of archival records held in museums all over the world of hunting practices of the Indian Maharajas and the British officers and nobility from 1850 to 1950 across regions of India. This led her to get a clear assessment and establish a large database of which mammals had either gone extinct or sharply reduced in numbers as a consequence of unchecked hunting at the time. Her research showed that tigers for instance, had disappeared from 60 percent of the territories they used to inhabit while lions had disappeared from 97 percent.

So in 2009, after 13 years of living in the United States and earning all the qualifications required for a rich career in academics and research there, Krithi returned with the intention of contributing more meaningfully in her own country, working in the initial phase with the Wildlife Conservation Society, a New York headquartered NGO and then proceeding to join the Center for Wildlife Studies (CWS), set up by her father in 1984. For the first five years, she continued her work as a research scientist and familiarised herself with the Indian landscape in her field.

In 2014, five years after her return, Krithi decided it was time to apply her learnings to effect real-life ground level changes and launched Wild Seve, a toll free helpline for villagers living around the Nagarhole and Bandipur sanctuaries to access assistance when they lost their crops, livestock or even a family member due to a conflict with wild animals. Laws are in place and several state governments offer compensation in such cases but for villagers accessing this is no mean task as they are not equipped to deal with the paperwork, have to travel long distances to file claims and provide certification for their livestock. There was often a slip between the cup and the lip and this led to several villagers giving up and accepting their fate, leading to higher resentment against both the authorities and the wildlife.

Annually, over 100,000 human-wildlife conflict cases are reported across India, with government compensation at around Rs 40 crore. However, underreporting (30-80% in some states), policy issues, delays, and high transaction costs hinder compensation access. With their learnings from the two parks it launched in, the programme supported by donors like Oracle, National Geographic, Rainmatters Foundation and Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies has been extended to 15 national parks and will spread to 30 parks across India. Further, CWS and Wild Seve, in collaboration with Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, identified gaps in Karnataka's ex-gratia compensation policies and are now advocating for a standardized statewide compensation law. “We were finally helping solve some of the problems that stare us in the face rather than just documenting them”, says Krithi. A total of 27,000 villagers have been able to seek compensation with the help of the Wild Seve field team. Global appreciation of the work helped win the Rolex prize for enterprise and Krithi was picked by the National Geographic as its 10,000th grantee and explorer, besides a host of other awards for her work over the years.

Although the governments are not yet fully at grips with this, a major problem identified by the CWS team--which has grown from 16 to 112 people today--has been the increasingly fragmented shrinking habitats and high human-wildlife conflict, while people--farmers in particular--living around face significant loss of livelihoods and risk to their lives and properties. So even as CWS defined its mission to “Rewild India” by conserving wild lands and wildlife, it was aware that someone needs to keep the interests of the farming community in mind. To tackle this, a programme called Wild Carbon was launched in 2022 where the intention is to work with 10,000 farmers, located near or within wildlife parks and who face escalating human-wildlife conflicts. “Government compensation rarely covers actual crop losses, perpetuating poverty and frustration. This breeds hostility toward wildlife, leading to retaliatory killings”, explains Krithi. Wild Carbon will tackle this problem at the grassroots level by working directly with the affected.

With two young daughters, multiple fast growing projects and a couple in their infancy, what has been heartening for Krithi--her parents now joke that they need appointments to meet their only child--is the financial and collaborative support they have received from other NGOs, corporates, sponsors, donors and even state governments, some of whom have responded enthusiastically to their initiatives. But with India라이브 바카라 106 national parks spread over a vast, accumulated area of 44,402 sq kms, she and her CWS team has their task cut out for it. There is little time to celebrate the milestones as they prepare for the circuitous road ahead.