Column | Krithi Karanth’s rules of co-existence

Krithi Karanth spent a lot of her childhood being silent, sitting on wooden benches in metal watchtowers soaring above sprawling forests, with her father Ullas Karanth, a conservation scientist and tiger expert. “For six hours a day, I’d have to just sit there,” recalls Krithi, 47. “He didn’t even let me carry a story book or a Walkman. It was literally lunch, a pair of binoculars, and a ‘sit here and watch’. You do this almost 17 years of your life and it does something to your brain, right?”

It certainly rewired the way Krithi viewed the world — with a lot of patience. Had she not been a conservation biologist, she might have become an architect or an interior designer, but the scientific community is richer for people like her.

In 28 years, she has won at least 50 awards, most recently becoming the first Indian to win the prestigious Esmond B. Martin Royal Geographical Society Prize in the U.K. An adjunct professor at Duke University and CEO of the Centre for Wildlife Studies (CWS) in Bengaluru, an organisation founded by her father 42 years ago, her work examines the interactions between humans and animals, with a focus on co-existence and empathy. Let’s call them her rules of co-existence.

Right to exist

Krithi, who spends a few days in the wild every month, knows that children are always the best place to start. “Our children get excited about kangaroos and lions and giraffes, but if you ask them about a gaur or a lion-tailed macaque, they have very little knowledge, right?” she says. “So what can we do to build curiosity and excitement?”

That was the starting point of her conversations with environmentalist Gabby Salazar in 2017, at a time when India desperately needed to discuss the fading of its last wild spaces and species. Their ‘Wild Shaale’ programme is now taught in 1,600 government schools to more than 71,000 children across the Eastern and Western Ghats, the latter being one of the world’s leading biodiversity hotspots, and struggling to survive relentless human incursions. Krithi’s children, 18 and 10, often travel with her and they have learnt to sit still, too.

The Wild Shaale programme builds empathy, curiosity, and shows children why they need to share space with other species. An elephant foraging game (with poker chips to represent food and water), for example, helps them understand how much elephants consume (an adult eats 200-250 kg of grass/fodder every day). At the end of the game, the children count their tokens to see if they collected enough to survive. “They realise how much elephants need to eat and why crop damage happens,” says Krithi, adding that Indian children score high on empathy assessment scales.

“Most Indians have this fundamental belief that animal life has a right to exist,” she says. “We are much more in tune with the fact that there is non-human life out there.” And, yet, India ranked fourth from the bottom out of 180 countries in the 2024 Nature Conservation Index. Krithi’s work is important in a world where the average size of monitored wildlife populations has declined 73% in the 50 years to 2020 (source: World Wide Fund for Nature).

Building trust

Krithi’s LinkedIn profile describes her as a conservation optimist and while she knows that the battles have intensified, she sees the silver linings: broader public support, greater recognition that the environment matters, and more funding. “If you look at the number of people in this country who care for the environment, for animals, that number has grown,” she says.

Thanks to the Internet, even those who don’t see animals in the wild can appreciate their importance. “Information access is more equal than it was before,” she says. “That gives you an opportunity to create more people who are going to do stuff for nature.”

She contrasts the loneliness of the early environmentalist with a wider community of invested people today. “It’s very apparent to me that people just know more,” she says.

Krithi’s mindset is that of a marathoner and not a sprinter. “You keep going three steps forward, two steps back. You have to be resilient and gritty, not get overly joyous when something works, and then, when it slides back, go into this doom and gloom scenario,” she says. To see her name on a scientific paper, to witness children participate, and to see ideas succeed are all small joys for her.

CWS’ Wild Seve programme, where people can reach out for ground support with any human-animal conflict through a toll free number, is now in its 11th year and thriving in 30 wildlife parks. It offers support to rural Indians on the frontline of wildlife conservation efforts. Krithi jokes that her team could easily win elections because they are consistent and reliable. “That builds faith and confidence in people,” she says. “And I think trust is so much in deficit today.”

The writer is a Bengaluru-based journalist and the co-founder of India Love Project on Instagram.

Published – April 03, 2026 06:25 am IST