Illegal Wildlife Trade in India with Dr Dipankar Ghose, Senior Director, Biodiversity Conservation, WWF India

August 14, 2024August 19, 2024 ~ Lalitha Krishnan ~ Leave a comment

Heart of Conservation podcast Ep #38 Show notes (Edited)

0:00:07: Hi, I’m Lalitha Krishnan, and you’re listening to Heart of Conservation. I bring you stories from the wild that keep us all connected to our natural world. Today, I have a very special guest, and we are going to be talking about the illegal wildlife trade. Illegal trade in vulnerable to critically endangered plants and animals is an organized crime network that has spread its tentacles across every continent.

0:00:31 Lalitha Krishnan: It takes a huge world network of very specialized partner organizations to bring down illegal wildlife trade. I’m speaking with Deepankar Ghose. Senior Director, Biodiversity Conservation, WWF India, to get the scope on illegal wildlife trade in India and abroad. He’s a conservator with three decades of experience under his belt, and I’m impatient to tap into his insights and hear of his battles on tackling the dark side of nature conservation.

0:01:00 Lalitha Krishnan: Deepankar, welcome to Heart of Conservation. I’m so happy to have you on board.

0:01:05 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Thank you, Lalitha. It’s an honour to be on this podcast.

0:01:12 Lalitha Krishnan: So, you know, if one were to dig deep enough online, one could possibly see illegal wildlife trade routes for wildlife and exotic plants originating from our own country. With the demand growing, how serious a problem exactly is wildlife crime in India? And what numbers are we talking about?

0:01:36 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Well, first of all, let me congratulate you, or rather also thank you for bringing up a very important topic on wildlife trade. And today we are going to talking about the wildlife trade, more about the illegal wildlife trade. It is very big, unthinkably big globally. Now, when we come to India, wildlife trade in India is thriving because India is a source country. As long as countries, of course not India, but other countries continue to believe that rhino horn will cure cancer or a tiger bone vine will increase somebody’s strength our animals will continue to get poached. With a very high level of protection and dedication from the forest guards and tremendous support from the local community, poaching has been contained in many places, but it is still there. So we can’t say that poaching has stopped. What we need to also recognize is the fact that the culture of conservation in India, does not allow a tiger to be poached easily, right?

0:02:52 Dr Dipankar Ghose: So if, and we have actually seen it, that once a poacher in a village was identified, the person was kind of boycotted. So the local people support conservation, but it is the commercial nature of illegal wildlife trade. It is the very high demand and at times, pricing that allows the trade to thrive. Believe you me, rhino horn is nothing but a cluster of hair, which means it is keratin. Keratin does not cure cancer.

*Tiger skin photo credit: Dr Saket Badola*

0:03:25 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Same thing with tiger bone. It’s similar to any other carnivore bone. It will not add to the strength of a person. So while we are working in the country on strengthening protection and using modern tools to carve poaching, one also needs to work outside the country, which global organizations are doing to ensure that the demand is also reduced. So to answer your question, it is big, it is thriving, and India as a country acts as a source for some of these charismatic threatened animals. And we are talking about tiger body parts, rhino horns, elephant tusks, and sometimes even elephant bones and skins and blood bits.

0:04:17 Dr Dipankar Ghose: We are also talking about marine species, freshwater turtles, pangolin scales, you name it. Most of the threatened species from India, animal species particularly, are in the illegal market.

0:04:33 Lalitha Krishnan: Right. It’s also like a catch 22 situation where we have so much and so much has been done to look after it. But at the same time, there’s a demand for all of this. So, you know, most of us have heard of tigers, rhinos being sold for medicine and skin, and the exotic pet trade of fish and birds. But most of us, I’m sure, in India, I’m not talking of the general public, who knows about the ‘conservation’ field… But, you know, a good number of us don’t even recognize the timid pangolin, which is part of this ongoing illegal network.

0:05:11 Lalitha Krishnan: And I read that 23.5 tons of pangolin were traded in 2021 alone. Of course, I don’t have the latest numbers, but why is it so? Could we speak about why pangolins are the new tigers or the new most fashionable thing to trade?

0:05:29 Dr Dipankar Ghose: So pangolin scales are used in traditional oriental medicine, right? They’re never used in their fresh form, they’re used in their dried form. And there are papers published in reputed scientific journals which say that— there’s one particular paper I can send it to you—which says scales are burnt, roasted, ashed, cooked in oil, butter vinegar, boy’s urine, or roasted with oyster shells to cure a variety of ills.

0:06:00 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Among these are excessive nervousness and hysterical crying in children, women possessed by devils and ogres, malarial fever and deafness. So many pangolin skeleton requests for this purpose that yearly, the scales from some 5000 individuals were imported from a particular country. And these are all going into traditional Chinese medicine. The challenge again is the belief whether the scales have that kind of a property is not scientifically proven, but they are going to be used all the same as the rhino horn. It is keratin, which we know, does not cure cancer.

0:06:44 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Right. If it could be a cure, then probably we would have eaten up all our hair or bitten off all our nails just to prevent cancer from happening. But it doesn’t help in any way. So same thing with pangolin scales. And what we are also hearing is that pangolin scales, because the belief is they cure a lot of illnesses, they help women to lactate and stuff. People started using dry pangolin scales as a hair comb for combing their hair and brushing their hair.

0:07:20 Dr Dipankar Ghose: They make tiny combs out of those scales or use them as guitar plucks just to have a feel, just to touch a pangolin scale. So it’s deep in the belief that the challenge is that the users do not understand that a species is going to be exterminated from nature. Just because there is an unscientific belief in their mind, in oriental medicine, that’s the challenge.

0:07:51 Lalitha Krishnan: And this is such a small creature, it makes it even more vulnerable to ignorance you know?

0:07:58 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Absolutely. I tell you about 20 years back when many tiger skin seizures happened from India and Nepal, some of those seizures had also recorded the trade of otter skin. And then one found out, and I had been to Tibet and figured out this otter skin was used to make collars of coats of chuba. Why? Because otter skins have a very good waterproofing quality or character. So when it is snowing or it is raining, snow won’t settle on a coat which has got an otter skin collar. Now, my point is that in this time and age, when we have so much synthetic material use why kill a poor otter in the wild?

0:08:47 Dr Dipankar Ghose: And you’re not, not using farmed sablel hair, but you’re actually killing wild otters to use their skins on your coat.

0:08:56 Lalitha Krishnan: Makes my skin crawl. Is this still going on?

0:08:59 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Yes, we still hear otter skins getting seized. It’s like—at some point of time—in some parts of eastern India, Banded Krait, which is a very… it’s a poisonous snake, but a very docile snake. The Banded Krait was almost exterminated because there was high demand from the fashion industry to manufacture leather bags of Banded Krait skins. You know, yellow and very bright yellow and black stripes.

0:09:30 Dr Dipankar Ghose: That kind of exterminated the Banded Krait, which created another problem, because the Banded Krait, thrived on smaller snakes. They ate small snakes, and one of their food snakes was the Common Krait. So in Sundarbans, the hypothesis was that many people started encountering Common Krait. You see them inside your homes and fields, and you’re somebody getting into the farming room and stuff and getting bitten and bitten in odd places, odd times and dying.

0:10:04 Dr Dipankar Ghose: And one of the reasons scientists and naturalists who were working on this had said, “If bandit crates were there and there were a high number of Banded Kraits, they would have kept the population of Common Kraits.” I mean, that exactly is a typical maintenance of ecological balance. You know, one creature maintains the balance of another. But we took out the Banded Kraits, they were poached for fitting into the fashion industry.

0:10:33 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Demand for snake skin all gone, you know. So, I mean, we sometimes do not even think of… there is the whole illegality of it, but there is also the ecological aspect of it. And many a time one doesn’t see the ecological aspect. At some point in time, in the southern part of the country, the large tuskers were all poached, and most of the tuskers were poached. So the sex ratio was skewed and breeding success went down because the makhnas or the tuskers with smaller tasks were not selected by breeding-age females.

0:11:10 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Now that’s getting recovered in successful conservation initiatives, its population is recovering. So there is this whole ecological aspect which also needs to be looked at when we deal with illegal wildlife trade, right?

0:11:25 Lalitha Krishnan: And also communicated, I don’t think people realize what happens if you take all these species, especially keystone species off the picture. Wow, that’s interesting. Have you ever personally out of choice or otherwise been involved in particularly monitoring or witnessing wildlife training?

0:11:49 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Well, in my previous avatar, I was working with another organization and I was in charge of the enforcement unit: Wildlife Enforcement unit. So NGO’s and civilians… we are not authorized to take any enforcement action. So we worked very closely with government agencies, and enforcement agencies and monitored illegal wildlife trade and at some point in time also helped the government to bring an end to that trade. So this was around 2003, 2004 when I was working with another organization and we worked with the government of Uttar Pradesh to curb trade, or rather illegal trade in mongoose hair paintbrush.

0:12:35 Dr Dipankar Ghose: And initially what looked like a small industry of manufacturing paintbrushes, which is sold to the artists and students, we figured out that some of these brushes were actually getting into the fashion industry because that was one of the most preferred brushes, organic brushes for painting or face painting or colouring or masking. It was quite a long process. When we monitored this trade, often working with government agencies involved a lot of meticulous planning, careful planning and taking utmost care not to expose some of the people who were giving that information.

0:13:20 Dr Dipankar Ghose: And ultimately working with the government to curb the trade and bring the offenders to the book. So yes, I did that. But from WWF currently, we are not into any of these enforcement actions. If we get to know about any illegal trade, whether it’s through online monitoring or whether it’s based on information received by any of our field members, we immediately pass on the information to the nearest government authority, either the wildlife crime control bureau or the forest department.

0:13:56 Lalitha Krishnan: I mean, who would imagine part of your makeup is from a mongoose? To even think that, it’s just so sad. Could you explain what the wildlife trade chain is? Just to have some basic understanding.

Sable fur skins in Milan. Photo by Kuerschner – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3734346

0:14:18 Dr Dipankar Ghose: It’s very, very interesting. And I will take the example of Sansar Chand. And often people used to say that Sansar Chand is the Veerappan of north India, but that’s not true. So Veerappan was a person who was extracting sandalwood and who was also trading in sandalwood. But mostly his job was extraction and some bit of trade. Right? When I say extraction because it was plants, it was trees, which he was into, timber, which he was trading in and smuggling. Come to north India, a Sansar Chand, Sansar Chand was not a direct poacher. He might have instigated or asked somebody to poach an animal, but he was essentially a trader, a big-time trader of wildlife derivatives.

0:15:08 Dr Dipankar Ghose: So there is a change in the process that we are seeing. Earlier, there used to be poaching syndicates and illegal wildlife trade syndicates which used to manage some of these. But with the advent of the Internet and social media and the dark web, a lot of supply chains and logistics solutions, we are seeing that the trade of illegal wildlife products is now going online. There was somebody who was announcing that, “Hey, I have this particular animal and a live specimen. If you would like, contact me”.

0:15:46 Dr Dipankar Ghose: And not even through the dark web in a masked way…he was presenting it on an online platform. Obviously, enforcement action was initiated against the person. So the chain happens is that from the point of poaching, from the source point, it crosses our borders, land borders, primarily through Nepal or through Bhutan or through Bangladesh. Otherwise, it’s through the seaports. A lot of seizures of star tortoises have happened in the seaports.

0:16:18 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Marine products through the seaports. And some fancy products are also very expensive, like shatu shawls. They are also transported by human carriers. E.g., a passenger would buy a shahtoosh shawl in India and they would take it in person when they would fly out of the country. So it’s mixed and there is no one particular trade route, but essentially a land route through the northern and eastern border.

0:16:46 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Northeast has become, especially the Indo-Myanmar border has become particularly vulnerable to illegal wildlife trade. So, yes, land routes from those sides, seaports and sometimes also air routes.

0:16:59 Lalitha Krishnan: It’s more complicated than we can sort of figure out or understand.

0:17:06 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Yeah, indeed.

0:17:08 Lalitha Krishnan: At the same time, it looks so simple. I mean, a passenger taking a shawl across would be not suspected at all. Crazy.

*Leopard skin photo credit:* *Samir Sinha*

0:17:17 Lalitha Krishnan: You know, talking of technology, it’s always evolving. Would you like to tell us something about environmental DNA or eDNA that WWF uses or something new that we might not even be aware of?

0:17:35 Dr Dipankar Ghose: A very good question. We do not have a laboratory and we work primarily with government agencies. eDNA, technology is evolving and I hope that one day, subject to the availability of our resources, we will be able to get into the eDNA space and strengthen the work that researchers and officers from the government are doing. But there is something that we started about seven, eight years back. This is called the RhODIS® -Rhino DNA indexing system, where we have been partnering with the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change Government of India (MoEFCC) and the Wildlife Institute of India(WII) to establish this system.

0:18:21 Dr Dipankar Ghose: The technology was borrowed from South Africa. I would say, users and initiators of the technology transferred the technology to the laboratories here and now the Wildlife Institute of India have the marker for rhino populations from all the wild, rhino-bearing areas of India. So what happens is that once a rhino is poached and its horn is collected, and if there is any tissue in it and DNA can be salvaged from there, then the rhino DNA is matched and the population where from it was collected is identified, which helps in strengthening the case. The prosecutor can then pinpoint and say that, okay, hey, this particular rhino horn, which might have been seized in a city, can say that, well, this matches with the population here.

0:19:17 Dr Dipankar Ghose: And if a carcass has been found and the DNA samples obviously, have been collected from that carcass, then that horn might even be matched with the carcass of rhino, which was poached. And, using this information, in the recent past, one conviction has happened where a person who was in possession of a rhino horn, was matched with a poached rhino. And then the call details record also showed that the suspected poachers were also talking to this person who was a trader. So this kind of technology also helps. Earlier, it would have been impossible to establish a link between the trader and the poacher. And although the case would be there when a ScheduleI species derivative would be seized from the possession of a civilian, the case would get strengthened if it could be linked with a particular poaching incident.

0:20:14 Lalitha Krishnan: That’s so interesting and so nice to hear that. So it’s not only concrete evidence, but it’s speeding up the whole process of catching them before they leave the territory, wherever that is. Or the country, I suppose. Apart from the latest technology, which is also available to crime networks, what other methods or soft tools do you think are imperative to keep illegal wildlife trade at bay? What does WWF do?

0:20:50 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Again, a very good question. I think technology is important and we are working with the government agencies to help them with technology. There is a simple tool which was promoted by WWF and now many agencies use it. It’s called Deep Search Metal Detector, used to find leg snares. Sometimes these leg trap snares, metal snares, are put on the forest floor, primarily meant for catching carnivores like tigers and leopards and sometimes even herbivores. Now these DSMDs, the Deep Search Metal Detector would help a person, a forester, a forest guard, or a ranger, to find a snare.

0:21:38 Dr Dipankar Ghose: It would also, in a crime situation, help the officers to find empty cartridges or bullets or shells or metal cells or even a weapon if that was hidden in the nearby area or near the crime scene. So we also use forensic kits and stuff. But the most important fact remains that protection can be strengthened by increased patrolling, surveillance and support from the local communities who are residing within or adjacent to these wildlife habitats.

0:22:18 Dr Dipankar Ghose: These three things are of primary importance. Protection, surveillance, and community support. So we work a lot with the authorities, with the protected area managers or reserve forest managers, which are wildlife habitats, to strengthen protection, help them in surveillance using something like sniffer dogs, which could continue or which could help in the investigation, finding a spoor and also work on securing community support against wildlife crime.

0:22:56 Dr Dipankar Ghose: There is one area I would like to mention in the Terai particularly, in Uttar Pradesh. We have been able to establish, together with the forest department and local panchayats, a group of volunteers who are there to protect tigers. They’re called Bhag Mitras and there are about 500 of them. It’s a fully voluntary force and their primary role is to help the authorities in managing human-tiger conflict.

0:23:25 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Whenever there is a challenge: a tiger is in human dominated landscape, these people come out and they form the first line of defense. So this really helps in managing conflict. But this also deters a suspected poacher. Because with so many people trying to protect the tiger, a poacher would not dare to go there because this particular group of people would then not support or would do something to stop poaching.

0:24:01 Lalitha Krishnan: First line of defence.

0:24:04 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Yes, indeed.

0:24:05 Lalitha Krishnan: My next question is how does your partnership with other agencies like TRAFFIC (Trade Records Analysis of Flora and Fauna in Commerce) help fight wildlife trade in India? Or do you have other partners and what are their different roles?

0:24:18 Dr Dipankar Ghose: So traffic is part of WWF and I am also the Interim Head of TRAFFIC in India for the last two years. And so it’s the same team which is working whether we call it TRAFFIC or WWF. But in terms of partnership, we partner a lot with not just government agencies but also NGOs and other intergovernmental bodies. We recently partnered is the South Asian Wildlife Enforcement Network (SAWEN) and the Global Tiger Forum in capacity building of enforcement authorities along the Indo Napal border at a very, very high level and a strategic level.

0:24:57 Dr Dipankar Ghose: We also work with other NGOs while it talking about capacity building or curriculum development for ranges. So most of the partnerships are through the government agencies coordinated by the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau or the State Forest Department or the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change where we partner with other enforcement agencies or with other NGOs.

0:25:25 Lalitha Krishnan: Dipankar, whatever you’ve been telling me, it’s such an insight. There’s so much, as ordinary citizens that I don’t know, and I’m sure most people don’t know most of what you’re talking about. So thank you so much for those insights.

0:25:39 Dr Dipankar Ghose:: You’re welcome.

0:25:40 Lalitha Krishnan: I kind of know the answer, but I don’t know the answer. So is illegal wildlife trade a people problem or is it a government problem?

0:25:52 C: It’s a problem of both sides.

0:25:55 Lalitha Krishnan: All right.

0:25:56 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Why is it a people problem? It’s the people who do the poaching. They are normal people. What is driving them to poaching is different, but they are poaching.

0:26:08 It’s the people who are the traders, right? It’s the people who know about it but are keeping silent about it. And I’ll give you another insight, which is India is also becoming a consumer country, right? For what? For exotic pets. We have created a report from TRAFFIC India last year and you can download the soft copy from our WWF India website. We are becoming consumers of exotic pets in the country. All the way from a kangaroo roaming around on the highways of north Bengal, to vultures, to wildcats, to a lot of exotic primates from Latin America. Where are they all going? We don’t have these animals. They are all coming to India as pets. The more people have affordability and more people have disposable money, they would like to do something exclusive.

0:27:08 C: Dr Dipankar Ghose: And you can’t keep any Indian bird or an Indian mammal as a pet because that’s illegal under the Wildlife Protection Act. Right? So instead of going the legal ways of, you know, keeping budgerigars or there are some captive-bred birds which can be kept as pets legally, people are trying to find exclusivity. It’s like, okay, this person has a ball pen, and that’s a Reynolds or Uniball. I want something exclusive. It doesn’t mean that the price has to be double or triple or four times, but it has to be exclusive. So people are always looking for that exclusivity. People are always looking for the attention. So it is a people’s problem.

0:27:51 Dr Dipankar Ghose: It is also a government problem because people can reduce the demand, but ultimately, enforcement actions will have to be taken by the government.

0:28:00 Lalitha Krishnan: Right.

0:28:00 Dr Dipankar Ghose: So it’s a problem of both. That is why I have always been saying on this podcast, as well as whenever I am talking about it or writing about this particular issue, that the support of local communities around the forest areas is of paramount importance if we are trying to stop poaching. Similarly, the support of people, of the business people or the people who are engaged in supply chain management is of paramount importance if we have to stop illegal wildlife trade through the usual supply chain or the usual logistics channel. So that is why there has to be an active involvement of people and, of course, government actions which are already going on.

*Rhino* *horn photo credit: Dr Saket Badola*

0:28:47 Lalitha Krishnan: Okay. And, you know, what can a citizen do to report a crime of this level without risking his own life? Is there a channel? Is there any way he can report stuff that you see?

0:29:02 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Of course, one can make anonymous calls to the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau and it’s a very responsible government authority. But sometimes what happens is that in these anonymous calls, the veracity of the call or the verification can’t be done. So if a person is giving any information to the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, they take care of it, you know… so they, they take care of what’s the problem and why this problem has happened and stuff.

0:29:35 Lalitha Krishnan: Great. So I’d love to hear some, you know, positive stories or personal stories that give us all hope. I’m sure you have quite a few of them.

0:29:48 Dr Dipankar Ghose: There is hope because if you see so many tigers moving out of the protected areas-India has 3600 plus tigers, where that’s the mean number. It could be more, it could be a few hundred tigers more or so, right? If we are considering about 4000 tigers, adults and maybe some young ones included, 25% of those tigers are moving outside the forest areas, outside protected areas, and they are in the agriculture fields.

0:30:24 C: They are passing through here and there, right? Passing through human-dominated landscapes. There are challenges, but the tolerance of people for those tigers or to keep those tigers or tolerate allowing those tigers to be in the human-dominated space is tremendous. The tigers are allowed to be there, otherwise there would have been challenges. There have been occasional incidents where people got killed, or injured, tigers got lynched.

0:30:53 C: But if you look at the scale, in a country of 1.4 billion people, we still have 4000 tigers, we still have 27,000 plus elephants, so many rhinos, so many herbivores, leopards, conflict is there, poaching is happening, but still we have all these. Right, show me any other country which has got very high, I won’t say numbers, but a very high density of human population like we have, but still has so much wildlife wealth. It’s there in India only. Right?So that talks a lot about our tolerance and I think that is the positive story.

0:31:30 Lalitha Krishnan:: You know, also those numbers may bring cheer, whatever said and done. Yeah. No, no other country has that I think. This is my last question to you. You’ve shared a lot, a lot of food for thought, but would you like to share a word or an idea or something that you feel strongly about that you would like our listeners to remember, about wildlife crime? It could be anything.

0:31:57 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Only one thing. If you see anything unusual about wildlife, whether one is travelling by public transport or travelling by a forest area, village, or urban area, report it. I’m sure that anybody who is listening to the podcasts also has an email ID, right? So send an email to the authorities, to the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau. You don’t need to judge whether it’s a crime or it’s not a crime but inform, you know, just stay alert and inform that, like we do, when we see any unusual movement in the neighbourhood and we call up the police, a similar sort of alacrity has to be there if we are to stop wildlife crime.

0:32:42 Dr Dipankar Ghose: I would just like to leave that thought with our, with our listeners.

0:32:47 Lalitha Krishnan: That’s a great thought. You know, sometimes we don’t think we can do anything of the sort. We’re so scared of the consequences. But when you say it’s safe to report, then I think more people will and should.

0:33:00 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Yes. Send an email. Send an email to Wildlife Crime. Send an email to the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau and with just an email ID; let the authorities reach out to you if they see that this is, this is important, this is something that they could work on. I know they might come back to you saying that, “Okay. We would like to work on it”. Or maybe some officer might contact you.

0:33:21 Lalitha Krishnan: Okay. That’s super. That’s great. Thank you so much. This has been so enlightening and so good.

0:33:30 Dr Dipankar Ghose: Thank you.

DipankarGhose #WWF_INDIA #TRAFFIC #IUCN #Tigers #Rhino #Poaching #IllegalWildlifeTrade #Veerappan #CITIES #WildlifeLawEnforcement #ExoticPets #SAWEN #Pangolin #SansarChand #SmugglingSpecies #wildlifeproducts #exoticplants #rhinohorns #tigerskin #pangolinscales #LalithaKrishnan #HeartofConservation #critically_endangered #storiesfromthewild #podcast

Pangolin photo: Rajesh Kumar Mohapatra Podcast cover art created by Lalitha Krishnan

Birdsong by hillside resident, the collared owlet.

All photos courtesy as mentioned in caption /photo

Podcast artwork by Lalitha Krishnan

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The Legacy of Technology for Wildlife Foundation with Nandini Mehrotra

June 29, 2024June 30, 2024 ~ Lalitha Krishnan ~ Leave a comment

Heart of Conservation Ep #37 Show Notes (Edited)

Summary

Nandini sheds light on the innovative use of technology in conservation efforts. We discuss the diverse range of technologies employed in conservation, with a focus on spatial technology involving satellite data, drones, and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). Our conversation delves into various collaborative projects across different landscapes, highlighting the foundation’s expertise in cartography and the use of technology for land restoration and riverine wildlife conservation.

This episode also showcases the foundation’s pioneering work in utilizing drones for the study of river dolphins and gharials, emphasizing the ethical and collaborative approach taken in wildlife research. The episode captures the legacy of Technology for Wildlife Foundation, emphasizing its commitment to using technology ethically and thoughtfully to benefit wildlife, habitats, and local communities.

Our legacy should be remembered for prioritizing impactful grassroots action through technology for conservation.-Nandini Mehrotra (Technology for Wildlife Foundation)

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Transcript

0:00:09

Host: Lalitha Krishnan: Hi, I’m Lalitha Krishnan, and you’re listening to heart of conservation. I bring you stories from the wild that keep us all connected with our natural world. Today I’m speaking to Nandini Mehrotra from Technology for Wildlife foundation, a NGO based out of Goa. I have been chasing technology for Wildlife foundation for a couple of months now. Somehow the opportunity kept slipping through my fingers till now and just in the nick of time. And you will find out why soon.

0:00:37

Lalitha Krishnan: For now, I’m very excited to be speaking to Nandini, who’s the Program Manager, Technology for Wildlife foundation. She has an MPA in Environmental Policy from Cornell University and oversees the applied research projects. Her interests lie in the intersection of conservation technology and government. Welcome to heart of conservation, Nandani.

0:00:59

Nandini Mehrotra: Thank you so much.

0:01:00

Lalitha Krishnan: So, you know, Nandini, technology for wildlife sounds like such an innovative space to be in. You know, I know they’re very amazing ways of employing technology, so I’m very excited to hear your stories. Perhaps could you start with, you know, introduce us to some kind of technology employed in conservation efforts first, and then tell us all about technology for Wildlife Foundation’s expertise in this specific field?

0:01:28

Nandini Mehrotra: Sure, I think. I mean, I’d like to start by just mentioning that conservation technology itself is not new. It’s just changed form, like all the technology in our day to day lives. And it is, of course, like an increasingly growing field as smart technologies also continue to improve. So, yeah, technology for wildlife work very much comes from a place of seeing that if this technology is available and growing and agile, how can we use it for the betterment of the planet?

0:01:58

Nandini Mehrotra: But the kind of technologies are so varied. They include radio tags to camera traps, acoustic devices, sonar. Like every technology that exists in our day to day lives, conservationists have tried to adapt to see what we can do to use it for conservation. For us at Tech, for Wildlife, though, we mostly specialize in spatial technology, so we don’t work with this whole range of technology. We work a lot with satellite data and spatial data, so that can be things that are taken from satellites or also even just gps on your phone.

0:02:32

Nandini Mehrotra: We also use drones, both for their visual information, but also because they record spatial data as well and we use something called ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles), which are kind of like tethered underwater drones. They basically are like underwater cameras, which have motors and we can direct them.

0:02:52

Lalitha Krishnan: So that’s cool.

0:02:54

Nandini Mehrotra: Yeah, it’s quite fun to use them, but, yeah, that’s kind of the range of tech that we use.

0:03:01

Lalitha Krishnan: So, what other wildlife organizations do you collaborate with and in what range of landscapes?

0:03:08

Nandini Mehrotra: Most of our projects are all collaborative. We are always looking for partners who are doing impactful work and we feel they are aligned with. And if there’s a case where the tech that we have can assist with their work, then that’s how we choose our projects. So, the organization and work are really spread across the country and varied in that sense.

0:03:32

Lalitha Krishnan: Yeah.

0:03:33

Nandini Mehrotra: Goa, where we’re based, we collaborate quite a bit with the Goa Foundation and with WCT Wildlife Conservation Trust, we’ve been collaborating for the last couple of years in Bihar around freshwater ecosystems and wildlife. With Dakshin and WWF, we did some work in Orissa, around Olive Riddley turtles. In Ladakh, we work with IISER Tirupati. We also have an exhibit going on with the science gallery in Bangalore, where we compile our work on mangroves, along with three visual artists that we collaborated with.

0:04:13

Nandini Mehrotra: So that’s an exhibit that’s been running for the last few months, and this is the last month that it’s running. I think ecosystems and projects are quite varied.

0:04:22

Lalitha Krishnan: So, you know, can you speak about how you use cartography for conservation with specific partners, perhaps?

0:04:31

Nandini Mehrotra: Sure. So, one of the main reasons that we specialize in spatial technology is that we believe that a lot of time conservation, especially conservation, especially terrestrial, but really, everywhere is a land use position, and maps influence these positions. A lot of time, the visualization is easier for people to conceptualize, see our way of being able to use our skills to do work. So, we do use maps quite a bit.

0:05:02

Nandini Mehrotra: Some of the ways that we’ve been doing this is through collaborating with different partners, one of them being Mongabay India. We worked with them for two years. We did over 40 stories with them. So that covered a range of whatever topics they were working on, anywhere that, like visual mapping, could aid the story in any way. So we worked on those, on static maps, moving gifs, dynamic maps.. different and many things.

0:05:30

Nandini Mehrotra: Yeah, many things. Over 40 stories where must have been at least double of those maps. The other one that we’re quite proud of is there’s an update coming of Fish Curry and Rice, which is a book written by Goa Foundation and is currently in the being updated. So that entire book is about Goan ecology and environment. It’s kind of like a current state of affairs report, and we provided the cartography for that as well. For 20 maps.

0:05:59

Nandini Mehrotra: So that book should be published this year as well. So, we’re looking forward to seeing that.

0:06:04

Lalitha Krishnan: Quite a range. I shall look forward to Curry and Rice myself. What a catchy title.

0:06:12

Nandini Mehrotra: Yeah, yeah. There’s, I think, two versions of the book already out. Fish curry and Rice. Also in Goa.. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the Aamche Mollem campaign, but it’s a citizen’s movement that’s been running now since 2020. It was questioning three linear infrastructure projects that are passing through the state of Goa. So it’s a collaboration of activists, researchers, lawyers, kind of looking into the impact of these projects and trying to see what is the way forward that can be most beneficial to everyone and, like, least negative impact on the environment.

0:06:55

Nandini Mehrotra: And we also did cartography to be able to support that, both for analysis and for communication.

0:07:05

Lalitha Krishnan: Nice. So you seem to have had a busy 2023, and of course, you’ve done a lot of work based out of Goa. One of the areas you cover is technology for the restoration of land. Could you tell us more?

0:07:21

Nandini Mehrotra: I just wanted to start by talking about restoration in general as a growing field. It’s. Yeah. To both conserve biodiversity, restore land use, address climate change. It’s got many benefits and we’ve been seeing an increasing interest in this as a way to address some of these challenges. So, our aim was probably to see how can we use the tech and skills that we have to be able to enable and assist some of these processes.

0:07:55

Nandini Mehrotra: A lot of the people working in restoration need to be able to quantify and monitor their land better and to be able to see how to plan their activities more. So that’s kind of where we were coming in. So we were very lucky. We have two amazing colleagues, Alex and Christina, who are working to restore 150 degraded forests in Goa western parts. And along with many collaborators, we’ve been trying to see what we can do for this. So, there’s actually already a lot of research and tech that’s being used to assist restoration. But what we found is that some of the technology that normally people have written about includes technology that’s inaccessible to a lot of, at least NGO’s in the country.

0:08:44

Nandini Mehrotra: Like us, it was inaccessible. So, we realized that it must be similar for other NGOs in the country as well as in the global south generally. So things like LiDAR and multi spectral drones are still not so accessible, both in terms of cost and regulations… A bunch of things. We wanted to see from the tech and resources we already have, from as open access and affordable as things can be, what can we create?

0:09:09

Nandini Mehrotra: So, we’ve been using a combination of ground data, and basic off the shelf RGB, which is just visual color drones and satellite data to understand the land a bit more. So doing spatial analysis with the satellite data to understand levels of degradation, different factors of degradation, and then using our drones to see what more visual information can we get within computer vision models to extract some of this data and make the satellite models better.

0:09:44

Nandini Mehrotra: So, while we are giving all of this input to Alex and Christina, that piece of land. So hopefully it will be helpful for them to be able to see, okay, what does the entirety of the land look like? And to be able to see year by year how it’s changing. But we currently condensing the whole workflow and we’ll be trying to put it out soon so that it’s also useful for anybody else working on similar projects, because as I was mentioning, there are quite a few.

0:10:11

Nandini Mehrotra: So that’s what we’re working on in terms of restoration.

0:10:16

Lalitha Krishnan: Oh, cool.

0:10:17

Nandini Mehrotra: Yeah, I mean, it’s a really beautiful site, and it’s in the ghats, it’s very close to protected areas. So, in that sense, it’s also just an amazing place, even in terms of biodiversity. If that land is restored, it is like, it does have a lot of trees. It’s just the quality of the forest has degraded. Yeah, it is a beautiful piece of land.

0:10:41

Lalitha Krishnan: Yeah, sounds like it. Okay, so what is the other, project Technology for Wildlife is working on? I read about the riverine wildlife. Do you want to talk about that?

0:10:53

Nandini Mehrotra: I would love to talk about that. It’s definitely one of my favorite projects that we worked on. Just generally, for the context, we have obviously, incredible rivers and freshwater ecology in this country, and river dolphins and gharials are two of these. River dolphins are endangered. gharials are critically endangered. And we wanted to see what we can do to better understand and, how we can use our skills to protect these species. So, the experiment was kind of in multiple parts, in one.

0:11:28

Nandini Mehrotra: This is all in collaboration with Wildlife Conservation Trust. In one stint, we tried to combine many methods to see what is working for which species to understand them better. So, we, of course, were using drones for this, but they were also using acoustic devices, also just boat based visual methods to be able to understand one: How are species reacting to all of these? What can we do with minimal disturbance and what aspect of their behavior are we getting the best? So that for future surveys or any way to plan conservation efforts, what means should we be using? So, first, two of our trips were really around being able to understand this better.

0:12:13

Nandini Mehrotra: And recently we then built on this. So, for gharials, we realized that using drones was a very useful way to be able to cover large distances and disturb them minimally, get a better assessment of their numbers, size, bunch of things, as long as it’s done with a lot of care. They’re very sensitive to sound, so they have to be flown at a decent height above them. With river dolphins, we found that maybe not so much for counting them, but river dolphins are…

0:12:50

Nandini Mehrotra: They stay underwater and only come out to breathe for a fraction of second. And, they live in the Indo-Gangetic basin, and the water is extremely murky. Using underwater cameras, not really an option there. So, to be able to understand more about the species, their behavior, it is very hard to document. So, most of the accounts are quite muted because they’re seen visually. So, we found that in this case, using drones, we were able to capture a lot of video and video footage.

0:13:25

Nandini Mehrotra: So then we went back for our third round of fieldwork this year. We went to hotspots where we knew there was a lot of dolphin activity, and we were just staying there and observing these dolphins. So now we are building a lot more information on their body size -their size and their body condition based on that, and being able to build a profile of dolphins in a certain area in the Ganges. What is the condition, what are their sizes to understand, like, the profile of the population.

0:13:57

Nandini Mehrotra: A lot of this has kind of been experimental and innovative. It’s been a lot of fun to learn about, and Wildlife Conservation Trust is a incredible team, so it’s been a pleasure.

0:14:09

Lalitha Krishnan: Oh, nice. So, are you the pioneers in doing this? I’m not sure I’ve heard of dolphin studies with drones.

0:14:18

Nandini Mehrotra: Yeah. So, drones have been used to study dolphins around the world, but this has mostly been done for marine dolphins. I think also the Amazonian River dolphin people have used drones in. Yeah. So while some of it is still experimental, like, I don’t know of anybody else yet who has done size estimation of river dolphins in Goa. At least nothing has been published.

0:14:49

Lalitha Krishnan: Right. So, you know, you did not say that it was hard, but what are the challenges you face in your line of work? You know, like, do you ever have to deal with community and I am sure weather. And stuff like that?

0:15:03

Nandini Mehrotra: It ranges, really. There’s, of course, challenges that you have to address within the technicalities of the work. And then there’s more broadly the field. It’s interesting you brought community up so far. Actually, we never faced an issue with the community, with any community. I mean, yeah. For one, that we always work in collaboration with organizations that have been working in an area for a while and have a rapport with people there.

0:15:33

Nandini Mehrotra: You would never want to go into a place and, you know, not do anything that might not respect or scare anybody. You never want to be able to hide what you’re doing. So, anybody who has questions, any curiosity, you want to welcome that. I think ethics is always like a very tricky thing in this field, especially around drones, because there’s many cool things that you can do. But also, there are definitely concerns around privacy and safety that there’s always scope of things being misused, if not done sensitively.

0:16:12

Nandini Mehrotra: And also, I think drones also have a perception that make people also hesitant. Understandably so. So, I think one of the things for us has been also, you know, how to navigate this in a way. We have been very keen to distinguish ourselves, to make sure that we, you know, want to make it known that we will not do anything that would ever risk or harm anyone, even if it comes at the cost of not being able to collect the data we want to.

0:16:40

Nandini Mehrotra: We would rather give up that day of fieldwork than do anything that would make somebody uncomfortable. But that being said, the processes of how to go around it are so are not that clear. Right? It’s not like there’s a regulation or like a set protocol around how should you go around the ethics of when you’re doing a wildlife project or any work for that matter, and then you, tend to do whatever is in your capacity and possible. So because this was important to us, we kind of had our own internal checklist of what we were or were not okay doing.

0:17:16

Nandini Mehrotra: But that also comes within its own limitations of what we have read, what we are exposed to, and also what is possible. Right? We are also a small ngo going for a few days of field work somewhere. This is something that would require, say, like written informed consent of an entire community. Like, that’s not something that was within our reach, even. That requires like, a lot more systems that would…

0:17:45

Lalitha Krishnan: Yeah, but that is so good to hear. I mean, you must have done something right if you haven’t had any trouble so far. You know, you are sensitive and doing the right thing.

0:17:57

Nandini Mehrotra: I mean, honestly, people are intelligent and even if they do not know exactly what the tech is… If you are not trying to be sneaky about it, it’s quite straightforward. And of course, if somebody is not comfortable, then you just do not do it. And then if there’s in a place, if there’s ever a question of not being able to ask somebody or not being able to issue get the permission, or you just don’t do it.

0:18:23

Nandini Mehrotra: For us, that has always been the approach.

0:18:26

Lalitha Krishnan: 2023 was also eventful because the great loss of your founder, director Shashank Srinivasan, from what I read, he seems to have been a really passionate and charismatic leader. Would you like to speak a little about him and his work in Ladakh, perhaps, or just anything you would like?

0:18:48

Nandini Mehrotra: Definitely. The very existence of the organization is, of course, completely owed to Shashank, and he was an incredible person and conservationist and leader. I think he was really a very insightful creator in that sense. To be able to see a gap in the conservation ecosystem and create an organization to fill that gap, I think that’s quite…That’s not a small feat at all. I think that’s definitely something that deserves recognition. I think that’s something incredible to have achieved in his lifetime. And even within the organization, I think his creator instinct, like, to be able to, the way the projects are developed and conceptualized, always makes place for impactful work and prioritize that in what we’re doing. And, just, you know, what kind of work environment do we have? Like, what kind of work environment do you want to work in? What will help you flourish and then trying our best to create that. And I think that’s really, it takes many different skills and abilities for somebody to be able to create that, so that we’re very lucky to have had a workplace like that. And of course, he was incredibly skilled as a spatial analyst and card operator. So, in that sense, also an incredible creator.

0:20:14

Nandini Mehrotra: And, yeah, his projects, he was involved in every project, of course, that we were doing. But Ladakh, I guess, was like his longest running association professionally, I think his interest, I think, began during his own Masters thesis while he was there. He loved the black neck crane there. And during his masters, he was working with the community mapping with the Changpa community there.

0:20:40

Nandini Mehrotra: So, it began with that. And then he went back multiple times with different organizations. I think he went back to WWF as well. And then in 2019, he got a National Geographic explorer fund. So that was also for work in Ladakh. So, there we documented nine remote lakes, both aerially using drones and underwater using our ROVs. Yeah, it was incredible. Part of it was just that explorer bit, which was just there…

0:21:14

Nandini Mehrotra: They were quite remote lakes. Some of them were not even open for on the tourist circuit. So, to be able to document and share that also with everyone, because there’s always a sense of, like, how can anybody want to protect something that they don’t know or haven’t seen? And also, again, the aerial and underwater footage, again, as far as we know, it was one of the first things that a lot of it was being captured for these breaks, especially underwater, because it’s too dangerous for humans to dive in.

0:21:45

Nandini Mehrotra: Yeah, a lot of that was incredible to explore. And there was also a component of it which was looking at plastic. Plastic waste, because all these lakes are endorheic, meaning they don’t have like a river outpost. If any contamination ends up in the lake, that means it’ll stay there until somebody takes it out. So, it was also about looking at, is there plastic contamination even in the remotest of remote lakes in India? And if so, how much? And what are the companies, what kind of litter is there? So, we spend a lot of time collecting garbage around.

0:22:22

Lalitha Krishnan: God bless you guys. I always say that to anyone who collects garbage. But, wow, what an amazing experience to even be there and do this. Incredible.

0:22:35

Nandini Mehrotra: Yeah, we felt lucky, for sure. And while we were there, we ran into researchers from. IISER Tirupati who were working on pika, mammoths and wolves and conversing. Yeah, they were like, oh, if you are going to use drones anyway, see if you can see burrows. And we could. So then, then we then had a follow up project where Shashank went back and mapped their barrows for pika, mammoths, and wolves. And now that data is being analyzed to see, what we can distinguish? Like, can we map their burrows? Can we see how that habitat is changing?

0:23:10

Lalitha Krishnan: I’m a bit wolf crazy. I might just tap into your resources.

I am really sad that you’re wrapping up operations for Technology for Wildlife foundation. Yeah, I am sad to hear and sad to say it even. But what happens to all the work, you know, all this incredible work you have been doing in the past few years?

0:23:37

Nandini Mehrotra: Yeah, I mean, we are trying our best to document everything because that is actually our foremost concern also that we wouldn’t want work to be lost. I think the two things that I’m really pushing to be out there, one is that we’ve created, over this time, a pipeline of how we are using drones and drone data for scientific research and conservation. And all of this is done using like either very affordable or open access workflows and software. So, we are condensing the whole pipeline into videos and how to blog so that we can put it out there for anybody to use.

0:24:15

Nandini Mehrotra: So that, yeah, at least it’s there and hopefully it’s useful to more people. So that’s definitely one big part of it, along with codes and blog posts for almost every project and work that we’ve done. So that that stays on there on our website, as in.

0:24:29

Lalitha Krishnan: okay, so that will be up. You are not going to bring that website down.

0:24:37

Nandini Mehrotra: No, the website is going to stay up as an archive. And yeah, if there are any changes, I’m sure it’ll be updated there, but we will do that. And the other thing that will hopefully be up soon on that is an impact assessment, which I feel like is going to be for me, is important to be documented and put out there. One thing is just that so many projects happen generally with NGOs over time, scattered over regions and collaborators and years that sometimes it’s difficult to see it as a consolidated body of work.

0:25:09

Nandini Mehrotra: And I think for a field which can sometimes be disheartening, you know, people get jaded. I hope that seeing it as a consolidated piece of work in some way, know, at least show you what is possible to do, like what can be done if somebody decides to do some work, that is one thing. But also realistically, just the way funding models work generally, it’s not so easy as an organization to be able to put out…

0:25:44

Nandini Mehrotra: You know, I would not want to call them failures, but everybody tries different things in a space like this to have impact and some things work and some things. And while everybody can share very proudly what worked, they are not always in a position to be able to share what didn’t work so well as it should be. But right now, as we close operations, we are in a unique position where I think openly accepting things that may not have also worked or we may have thought worked, but somebody else assessing might think it could be better otherwise, like to be able to put that out for the whole ecosystem to be able, able to use. I think for me that is valuable. So, I’m also looking forward to like a third-party assessment, just compiling all the experiments that we have done over the last few years to be able to see what worked well, what was impactful, what will be better in the future, so that other people who are experimenting and working in the field, and even for us going forward, it gives some direction.

0:26:40

Lalitha Krishnan: That is inspiring and I think it’s very honest, you know, and bold to be able to do that. I mean, people can know what not to do if you put it out there and be inspired by everything else, you know, that you have done.

0:26:59

Nandini Mehrotra: Yeah.

0:27:00

Lalitha Krishnan: So, what for you, Nandani, is the legacy of Technology for Wildlife Foundation. What should it be remembered for?

0:27:09

Nandini Mehrotra: So, of course, our name, Technology for Wildlife, you know, it simplifies our mission and what we hope to have achieved in this time, just, you know, to do impactful work for the conservation of wildlife. And some of that will be innovation and impact. I mean, those are definitely things that want associates with us. But honestly, I do think tech and wildlife and conservation will continue.

If there is one thing about our legacy that I hope that we are remembered for, it’s that I hope that we remember that for using tech ethically and collaboratively, and to use it in a way that’s thoughtful for our planet, wildlife and also its people.- Nandini Mehrotra (Technology for Wildlife Foundation)

0:27:53

Nandini Mehrotra: So, for us, being able to be a bridge for some of those things was extremely valuable and a huge part of how we chose our projects and collaborators. We’re very aware that tech is an amazing gift and tool. It can also be used to exacerbate inequalities and differences. And we wanted to be able to work in a space that enabled more impactful grassroots action. So, I hope we are remembered for that.

0:28:32

Lalitha Krishnan: There are not many people or, you know, organizations ngos or otherwise that can say, “we’ve been ethical all along and we started doing the right thing and continue to do the right thing.” That is inspiring. And so, I just want to wish…

0:28:50

Nandini Mehrotra: To the best of our abilities. Sorry for cutting in. And I just went, like, I mean, at least I think, as per the best of our senses.

0:28:59

Lalitha Krishnan: Sure, sure. We are all human. Thank you so much, Anthony. This has been really great, and I wish you and all the your coworkers of Technology for Wildlife Foundation a great future.

0:29:15

Nandini Mehrotra: Thank you so much. It’s been really nice to speak with you.

0:29:19

Lalitha Krishnan: Take care.

Birdsong by hillside resident, the collared owlet.

All photos courtesy Technology for Wildlife Foundation

Podcast artwork by Lalitha Krishnan