In forest fringe villages across the country, communities live alongside wildlife, facing shared challenges that call for thoughtful, science-based approaches to coexistence.
The Centre for Wildlife Studies (CWS) has come up with a programme ‘Wild Seve’ that acts as a bridge between affected families and government mechanisms for compensation.
As Krithi Karanth, Chief Executive Officer at the Centre for Wildlife Studies, points out, the CWS team helps farmers with documenting claims, processing them, and accessing ex gratia from the Government.
Krithi has championed change on the ground for three decades, infusing hope and policy shifts into communities.
And this year, Krithi and the Centre for Wildlife Studies were named recipients of the prestigious John P. McNulty Prize!
This is the latest addition to a list of Krithi’s accolades, including the Rolex Awards for Enterprise (2019), the Eisenhower Fellowship (2020), and an Ananta Aspen Fellowship (2021).
Her work is aimed at helping communities that coexist with the wild.
Among CWS’s many programmes, there’s also ‘Wild Shaale’ that helps children in forest-fringe communities navigate the challenges of growing up amid human–wildlife conflict.
Through engaging, activity-based lessons delivered in multiple languages, the programme has reached over 59,000 children across 1,400 schools.
The ‘Wild Incubator’ programme invites proposals from organisations; the top five receive seed funding to pilot their ideas on the ground.
They encourage projects that focus on combating wildlife trade and illegal hunting, promote biodiversity conservation, and focus on restoration and rewilding.
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