The Better India
There is a particular kind of person who believes an animal can be brought back from the edge. Not saved in a zoo or a sanctuary, but actually brought back, to the forests and grasslands and coastlines where it belongs. India has more of these people than it sometimes gets credit for. A fisherman in Gujarat. A rewilding team in the Terai. A forest officer in Kutch. They do not always make the news. But what they are pulling off is extraordinary. And this week, we went looking for them. The fishermen who learned to see 'stars' differently There's a phrase the fisherfolk of Veraval now use when a whale shark crosses their path: "Paani mein taare" (stars in the water). They're talking about the spots on the fish's back, yes. But the fact that they're talking about them at all, with wonder and not a hook, is the real story. Two decades ago, whale sharks were hunted freely along Gujarat's coast. Today, the same fishing communities have formed protection committees, voluntarily report entanglements, and help researchers radio-collar the ocean's gentle giants. Over 1,029 whale sharks have been recorded as protected and released. Find out how a film, a ban, and years of patient trust-building made Gujarat's fishermen the whale shark's greatest defenders. Dudhwa's rhinos are walking wild again For years, they lived in a 27-square-kilometre enclosure in Dudhwa Tiger Reserve: monitored, cared for, but not truly free. This month, four one-horned rhinos aged between 15 and 25 were released into Dudhwa's open forests as part of a phased rewilding effort led by Dr H Rajamohan and supported by WWF-India. The reserve's free-ranging rhino population now stands at eight and growing. The Terai grasslands, which rhinos once shaped and sustained, are beginning to remember what it feels like to have them back. Here's the story of how Dudhwa is rebuilding its rhino legacy, one careful release at a time. 53 years ago, India made a bet on the tiger In 1973, with fewer than 2,000 tigers left in the country, India launched Project Tiger. A lot of people thought it was too late. It wasn't. Today, India holds more than 70% of the world's wild tiger population, and the forests that were protected to save the tiger ended up saving so much more: leopards, deer, rivers, birds, entire ecosystems that had begun to fray. At the heart of it were people who refused to look away: scientists, filmmakers, forest officers, and communities who staked their futures on the idea that the wild was worth fighting for. Read how one decision, made five decades ago, brought India's forests and everything living in them back to life. A tiny bird, a long road, and a miracle in the desert The Great Indian Bustard was once so widespread across India that it nearly became our national bird. Fewer than 150 remain in the wild today. So when IFS officer Dheeraj Mittal carefully packed a fertile bustard egg and transported it 770 kilometres from Rajasthan to Gujarat's Kutch Desert Sanctuary, placing it beneath a wild female for natural incubation, everyone held their breath. The egg hatched. The chick is a week old, watched over closely by a forest team doing its best to stay out of the way and let a mother do what mothers do. Read the full story of the egg that travelled across two states, and the chick that gave Kutch its first wild bustard hatch in nearly a decade.
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