Turtle Tales
In the 1960s, Anne Wright was one of the few prominent people involved in wildlife conservation in India. She was one of the founding trustees of WWF-India in the 1960s and a member of the Tiger Task Force commissioned by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to select tiger reserves for the launch of Project Tiger in 1973. She served on the national board for wildlife for nineteen years and was on the wildlife board for several states including much of Northeast India, West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. She played a little known but crucial role in the drafting of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 in India, by providing a copy of the Kenyan Wildlife Act to Indian bureaucrats in New Delhi who were drafting the Indian Act.
Belinda Wright is best known today for her work on tiger conservation and regulating trade in shahtoosh and other wildlife products through her organization, Wildlife Protection Society of India. But she played an important role in sea turtle conservation in India, starting from the time she became aware of the thousands of sea turtle deaths due… Read More
As a young biologist, B.C. Choudhury was part of a turtle monitoring unit organised by Robert Bustard to count olive ridley turtles during an arribada. This was an experience that led him to pursue a career on crocodiles rather than turtles, because he wanted to travel and thought at that time that working with turtles would not allow him to do so. After many years of working with crocodiles, he started supervising major projects on freshwater turtles, herpetofauna, cranes and coral reefs after joining the newly formed Wildlife Institute of India in the early 1980s. Through his student, Bivash Pandav, he got involved in sea turtles again, which led to the discovery of the rookery in Rushikulya In 1999, B.C Choudhury coordinated a national project on sea turtle conservation funded by UNDP… Read More
Chandra Sekhar Kar also discovered a second rookery… Read More
In 1994, Col was appointed by the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species (CMS) to the position of COP-appointed Councillor for Marine Turtles and served in this voluntary capacity for more than twenty-five years… Read More
Amukta Mahapatra went on to start Abacus, a well-known Montessori school in Chennai in the 1980s, and spent several years… Read More
In 1975, Rom started the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust along with his wife, Zai Whitaker, and also initiated crocodile surveys… Read More