There was a time in the 1980s and 1990s when the railway track between Haridwar and Dehradun was called the jumbo killer track. Here, hit by speeding trains, several mighty tuskers, female elephants and young calves lost their lives. One particular incident in 2001 smote the nation’s conscience when a young calf was badly hit and lay writhing in pain. Its helpless mother stood guard over it for days trying to nurse it back to life, ferociously attacking anybody who tried to intervene. After that incident, no elephant has died on the track that cuts through the Rajaji National Park.
For that the pachyderms have to thank the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), a Delhi-based NGO, which immediately undertook a big study of the track, identifying the vulnerable spots and then worked with a host of organisations, including the Indian Railways, in creating a safe passage for animals. Among the many interventions done, the Railways cut down the speed of trains passing through that belt, and forest officials cleared vegetation on tricky bends so that animals could see the trains.
Since then WTI has gone on to become synonymous with safe passage for elephants. In 2005, the wildlife conservation organisation, along with its global partner, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), identified 88 elephant corridors across India, detailing them in a book titled Right of Passage: Elephant Corridors of India. It has become a Bible of sorts, quoted by lawyers, activists, the Supreme Court and forest officials.
But the organisation set up in 1998 by four people — the late Ashok Kumar, Vivek Menon, Tara Gandhi and Thomas Mathew – with just ₹15,000 did not stop at survey and research. It went out into the field and actually helped the government in the creation of corridors. And mind you, despite government and legal support, setting up these animal passages is easier said than done — it involves reclaiming land from people in order to restore the habitats of wildlife, a task riddled with conflict that can take decades to, resolve.
“One of our largest areas of contribution has been elephant corridors. And the idea of Right of Passage for animals,” says Vivek Menon, the tall, strapping distinguished-looking executive director and founder trustee of WTI.
In Kerala’s Wayanad district, WTI showed the way, resettling and rehabilitating five villages and securing a key chicken neck corridor for wildlife to pass. Today, 5,000 elephants safely move between Karnataka and Kerala and Tamil Nadu using this corridor. And this was achieved in 10 years working initially against stiff opposition and finally winning over all the stakeholders. “Everybody profited. They were given livelihoods,” says Menon. It was a private acquisition model, with WTI raising the money to acquire the land, which it then donated to the government.
The second model was the one followed in Rajaji National Park, where it was a government project. WTI’s role was technical. “Our sociologists lived there for 10 years, understood the needs of the local people and ensured they got all the compensation the government promised. Now, after over 20 years, the project is more or less done — the flyover with an elephant passage below has also come up, though the railway line still has to be done. If you work through purely government machinery, it takes a lot of time to do it right,” says Menon.
The third model was the one followed at Garo Hills in Meghalaya. This took 15 years. “Here we have done it through the community. Investments are much less as we are not buying land. The community owns it, and the community keeps it, just giving up a part of the land to allow animals’ passage,” he says.
Science, Research & Action
Apart from these models, WTI also steps in when a road or some infrastructure is coming up at an ecologically sensitive point that could hamper elephant movement. “At such places, we appoint green corridor champions,” says Menon. “We have got this tight network, where issues are brought to our notice immediately on WhatsApp. We can take action much faster,” he says, describing how a combination of science, research and action has resulted in WTI’s impactful work in wildlife conservation.
The key focus at WTI is to work not only with animals but also with people, says Menon — a man mostly to be found in the wild with his binoculars trained on birds, tigers or elephants, or in courts, passionately fighting one conservation battle after another. This is the reason that WTI has on its rolls as many sociologists as zoologists and biologists, who work with empathy to resolve people’s problems before getting into animal conservation.
Over the 26 years of its existence, WTI has rehabilitated bears, rhinos, elephants, leopards, whale sharks, vultures and many more species, and stopped illegal trade in several wildlife products ranging from shahtoosh to ivory. It was a pioneer of sorts in conservation for the novel approach it took. “Till we started there were only two kinds of rescue. You rescued an animal and put it in a zoo. But that’s only half a rescue. The other kind of rescue was dogs, and cats and cows — not wild animals,” says Menon.
In fact, this was one of the reasons behind setting up the organisation. “Lots of people were doing research, lots of people were doing fundraisers, but no one was really rescuing and putting back animals in the wild,” says Menon.
The beginnings were humble. “Ashok and I were the executive founders, and Tara Gandhi and Thomas Mathew, then secretary-general of WWF, were trustees. Plus there were two more people helping us,” he says. WTI was set up in Menon’s two-room house in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar. “One room I slept in and one room was the office.”
Today, WTI operates out of a beautiful office in Noida dotted with hundreds of eye-catching artefacts and paintings of elephants, rhinos, tigers and whale sharks, many of them made by tribals. And a hundred committed people work on projects that are categorised under “nine big ideas” including Right of Passage, Natural Heritage Campaigns, Conflict Mitigation, Species Recovery and Protected Area Recovery.
A big factor behind WTI’s impactful work was that both Menon and Ashok Kumar came from a background of enforcement. Together they had set up the India office of TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network. “Before this, there was nothing called enforcement. We trained lawyers to become wildlife lawyers. In WWF, we started environmental law. We moved into all those areas to save wildlife,” says Menon.
And a big early win for WTI, driven by Ashok Kumar’s persistence, was its work on reducing illicit trade in shahtoosh, the fine wool obtained from the endangered Tibetan antelope. “Ashok’s tenacity helped,” says Menon, describing how they got a ban on shahtoosh production in J&K.
Besides the legal ban, WTI also did a massive movement with the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) and the ‘Say No to Shahtoosh’ campaign took centrestage at the Lakme Fashion Week. “We had a stall at Lakme India Fashion Week for 10 years because it was imperative to convince the rich not to buy shahtoosh,” says Menon. Kumar and Menon also toured abroad, working with organisations like the London Metropolitan Police to bust networks of illegal traders. The Tibetan antelope population began to rise.
But Menon is quick to say that at WTI they didn’t equate conservation with stabilising populations alone. “At that time, conservation meant population. But we showed that every individual in the wild counts — whether it was in the work we did with rhinos or vultures. You have to know how to rehabilitate animals. That has been a huge area of contribution from us,” he says.
WTI also showed the world how to put back species, like clouded leopards or rhinos. Another area of impactful intervention was to bring back areas that were going into disrepair and neglect due to a variety of reasons. The best example of this was its work in Manas which, after the Bodo uprising, had been nearly destroyed. The rhinos had vanished and the elephant population was halved. UNESCO put the park in the red list of danger. “But in five to six years we brought it out of the red list by physically moving rescued animals we had in Kaziranga and also by working through political channels,” says Menon.
Slowly, the Manas protected area size increased. “Never after Independence has a 500 sq km park tripled to a 1,500 sq km park,” says Menon.
So where did WTI find the funds to do all these massive interventions? Early funding came from IFAW, which continues to be a large donor. “Over the years we have diversified our funding pool. Now that CSR has come into place, we have got some corporate donors. Governments fund us too. And now finally individual donations are kicking in too,” says Menon.
Often, organisations thrive based on the founders’ charisma and then flounder when they are not around. Has WTI thought about the future? “We have ensured that does not happen. I gave up being a CEO many years ago. We have an able CEO now in Jose Louies,” says Menon, who says WTI follows a corporate sector ethic. All promotions, increments, and salary are calculated based on performance. But on projects they follow their heart.
“We make plans based on our nine ideas. People can come up with a project idea and the time needed — it could be three years, six years… and based on that we go and seek funds,” he says. “I always say if you have a good person and a good idea, we should go deep into the project as then the money will follow,” he concludes.