Help Save Elephants in India

Dear friend,

Hope you have been keeping well!

We are glad to share with you the updates for the project ‘Help save elephants in India’. Thank you so much for supporting this project and for your generous donation to the appeal on GlobalGiving platform.

The updates for today are about activities supporting ‘Right of Passage’; which is one of the flagship projects of Wildlife Trust of India (WTI). WTI has been working to secure the wildlife corridors through the ‘Right of Passage’ project to ensure uninterrupted movement of elephants and other wildlife species between key habitats and protected areas. The wildlife corridors are linear strips of land connecting two or more, otherwise fragmented, forest patches.

Along with forest departments and partner NGOs, WTI teams are working to protect 55 corridors across 5 regions (North-Eastern India, Southern India, Central India, North Western India and Northern West Bengal). We are working with a network of regional organisations and individuals called ‘Green Corridor Champions (GCCs) that work at the grass root-level and are involved in the protection of wildlife corridors within their regions. The GCCs help us in protecting the corridors and monitoring corridor usage by wild animals, doing policy advocacy and for spreading awareness on the importance of corridors among the local population.

12^th of August, every year, is celebrated as the World Elephant Day. On this day, GCCs in Uttarakhand and Tamil Nadu organised awareness events including bike rallies, painting competitions, webinars and road shows across the two states. The events were extremely successful where around 500 people took part in the celebrations. All this could be made possible with your support.

Once again, thank you so much for your generous support in our endeavour to provide ‘Right of Passage’ to the gentle giants. We will be soon back with more updates. Till then, take care!

With regards,

Team WTI

Dear donor,

Hope you are doing well and keeping safe.

Today’s updates are from the Wayanad region of the Western Ghats landscape. The Western Ghats hill ranges are a global biodiversity hotspot, and their positioning makes them a treasure house of biodiversity. The region particularly supports large elephant populations – approximately 30% of the world’s Asian elephant population live in this Western Ghats landscape.

Given the criticality of the landscape, Wildlife Trust of India has been working with communities on securing Right of Passage for Asian elephants in Wayanad for more than a decade. This quarter, we helped with capacity building of the frontline forest staff working within Protected Areas in Wayanad region and the local community. Frontline forest staff ae well as the communities living around forests are one of the most important stakeholders when it comes to conserving wildlife and guarding the Protect Areas. And so, training and capacity building is a great value add to their overall skillset. We conducted four workshops for the community living near forest habitats and frontline forest staff in Wayanad. Two workshops were on the importance of elephant corridors, one on forest fire awareness and precautions, and another workshop was conducted on Disaster management and Man-Animal conflict.       

Apart from the training sessions, field kits were distributed to the forest staff including the temporary frontline watchers who are actively engaged in ensuring safe passage to elephants as well as caution humans, when elephants travel through human habitations.  

Thanks to your generous support, we were able to continue our work on conserving elephants and their habitats in this part of the Western Ghats landscape. We will keep sharing similar updates with you, till then take care and stay safe.

Warm Regards,

Team WTI