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18th Sanctuary Wildlife Awards: From saving tigers to teaching wildlife conservation; know these green crusaders

DNA lists some of the bravehearts and winners amongst the 13 who will be awarded the 18th Sanctuary Wildlife Awards who during a function at National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) on December 8, 2017 in Mumbai.

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K S Simtha
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From a Nagpur based lawyer whose legal acumen has helped in keeping poachers behind bars to a ‘bird nerd’ who became the first Indian to complete a ‘Big Year’ to a young wildlife biologist who has helped understand Mumbai’s leopards better-these are some of the environment protectors amongst others who will be felicitated for their exemplary and dedicated work towards protection and conservation of Indian wildlife by Sanctuary Nature Foundation on Friday.

DNA lists some of the bravehearts and winners amongst the 13 who will be awarded the 18th Sanctuary Wildlife Awards who during a function at National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) on December 8, 2017 in Mumbai.

Valmik Thapar- Lifetime Service Award

He hardly needs any introduction and has been leading the battle to save the Tigers. Thapar has spent almost four decades tracking and protecting the most enigmatic cat and has taken their story to across the globe through his books and photographs. He has also served on over 150 committees of both central and state governments. His influence has been expansive, and though today he works almost exclusively in Rajasthan, with the state government, he has been instrumental in the revitalisation of other parks such as Maharashtra’s beloved Tadoba Tiger Reserve. Author of 32 books, including four on Africa, presenter of 16 international documentary films, and an excellent orator, Valmik Thapar’s gruff genius is what it took for India and the world to sit up and acknowledge the tiger’s magnificence, its predicament, and the urgency for conservation.
 
Jayachandran S- Wildlife Service Awards

Jayachandran S. has been at the forefront of the fight to save the Nilgiri and Sathyamangalam landscape in Tamil Nadu’s Western Ghats for over three decades. It was in 1990 that he started the Tamil Nadu Green Movement and, ever since, this people-powered initiative has stemmed the onslaught of unscrupulous industries and the timber mafia on this global biodiversity hotspot. He is a scrappy fighter, yes. But he’s also a solutions provider. By establishing a web of intelligence networks, he has been instrumental in helping the Kerala and Tamil Nadu Forest Departments bust poaching rackets, make seizures and apprehend hardened poachers. He has inspired many poachers to turn over a new leaf by surrendering their arms and ensuring alternate livelihood opportunities for them. Many of these ex-poachers today help the Forest Departments in blowing the cover on the modus operandi and operations of active wildlife criminals. Jayachandran is a hero whose contributions it is impossible to justly chronicle. He is a man in whose steps we hope many more will follow.

Kartik Shukul- Wildlife Service Awards

It was in the year 2013 that he managed to convince the judiciary that just because poaching attracted a sentence of seven years, it did not mean that the accused should be granted bail immediately. His legal acumen helped changed the perspective that the crime of poaching should be judged on the basis of its impact and it has ensured that several poachers not only went behind bars but also stayed behind it.

A special public prosecutor for the State of Maharshtra, Nagpur based Shukul has ensured that in the year 2017 itself there were six convictions in tiger poaching cases. Despite the tedious rigours of his work, Shukul also manages to devote many hours every month to building capacity within members of the lower judiciary, police officers, Forest Department, and fellow lawyers by teaching them how to effectively wield his weapon of choice – the Wild Life Protection Act. Kartik Shukul is a man of integrity and intelligence, whose resilience is taking out wildlife criminals one court case at a time.

Ramesh Pratap Singh, (IFS (Retd.)- Wildlife Service Awards

After serving in the Indian Forestry Services for more than three decades, R P Singh has worked through every tangent of wildlife conservation required to enable the revival of some of India’s most visited tiger destinations. His profound understanding of wildlife conservation, forest management, administration and law and his sensitivity to local communities, led to landmark developments across various Protected Areas. From voluntary relocations to wildlife crime control, Singh displayed exemplary management capability. R P Singh, in the pursuit of the preservation and protection of his beloved wilds, has left an indelible mark in India’s history of forest management and conservation, inspiring a whole generation of young officers.

Shashank Dalvi- Wildlife Service Awards
 
While birding at Jamnagar on the evening of December 31, 2015, Mumbai based wildlife biologist Shashank Dalvi spotted a Common Ringed Plover just an hour before dusk. While for others it might have been an end of a typical birding day, but for him it meant being the first Indian to not only successfully complete the prestigious 'Big Year' (an informal competition initiated in the United States amongst birders to check who can record the maximum number of birds in a span of one calender year) challenge taken up by birders but also recording a whooping 1128 birds in a calender year. Infact in 2016 he along with a team of scientists found a new species of bird- Himalayan Forest Thrush, a new bird species to science, and only the fourth bird to be described from India since its independence and named it after Indian ornithologist Dr Salim Ali. In 2012, he was a member of the team that discovered the shocking Amur Falcon massacre in Doyang, Nagaland, which catalysed an International conservation movement. A self-professed ‘bird nerd’, his long-term goal is to pioneer a nation-wide conservation programme for birds outside Protected Areas.

KS Smitha- Green Teacher Award

Smitha’s passion for the wild coalesced with her love for children in 1997, the year she chose teaching as her profession. Ever since, Smitha has been an affable pied-piper, leading her students to the tunes of conservation. Having built a green army, she spares no opportunity in taking her regiments of future green activists out of the classroom to explore and marvel at the beauty of nature. In order to fulfill her fundamental agenda of connecting children with nature, she has created multiple nature clubs for her school. Smitha, along with her students, has even lead an agitation against the Kolkata municipal corporation when it decided bulldoze dozens of trees for a road-widening project. She petitioned, rallied and took concrete steps to stop the rampage.  
 
Nikit Surve- Young Naturalist Awards 

Nikit is credited with conducting the first-ever official, scientific census of leopards in the urban wilderness known as the Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP) and has been able to showcase how the leopards are co-existing with humans. At 25, Nikit is a Research Associate with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and is working with dedication and passion on a complex and burning conservation issue – that of sharing space with our wild cat neighbours. Surve has also been helping the forest guards to understand more about leopards and engage them in understanding how camera trappings is carried out. He engages in impactful awareness campaigns based on his research findings that he conducts in schools, colleges and even in the remote sugarcane fields of Maharashtra, where communities live. 

Pandurang Pakhale- Special Sanctuary Tiger Awards

An iron man of the Maharashtra Forest Department, he is presently posted at the Pench Tiger Reserve as a Range Forest Officer (RFO) of East Pench Range. He is responsible for the arrest of more than a dozen tiger poachers. He has continued investigations despite strong protests and police complaints – the result of political clout and support of fish mafia for the poachers. In January 2017, he took on pangolin traders and poachers whom he took to court and stood up to political leaders who demanded his arrest and transfer. He also busted monitor lizard poachers and arrested eight of them in June 2017.

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