A Life for the Wild

For years now, in the villages around India’s wildlife parks, people lose crops to elephants, livestock to leopards and, sometimes, family members to tigers. Yet when conservation scientist Krithi Karanth asks them why they put up with it, the answer she hears, again and again, is one that keeps her going.

“The animals have been here as long as we have,” they tell her. “The animals have a right to live and we need to learn to share space with them.”

In 2026, Karanth has been named Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year, under its Perpetual Planet Initiative, which she describes as an “incredible honour and profound responsibility”, as well as an opportunity to “reimagine a world through courage and persistence to ensure wildlife and people thrive”. Karanth has been studying human-wildlife interaction in India for nearly 20 years, for which she has won numerous accolades, including being named National Geographic’s Emerging Explorer in 2012 and the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader in 2015, and winning the John P. McNulty Prize in 2025.

But her challenges remain as steep as ever. With less than five per cent of the country’s land set aside for wildlife, India still supports some of the world’s largest populations of elephants, tigers, leopards and other large mammals.

 “I’m a bit wary of using words like co-existence,” she says, “because that seems to suggest that people and animals are in this very stable relationship. I think it’s very dynamic, very adaptive. It’s constantly changing.”

Karanth is the daughter of celebrated conservationist, India’s “tiger man”, Ullas K. Karanth, and it is easy to assume that her career emerged through her experiences accompanying him to parks around the country. And perhaps it did, but in her mind those remained just trips for her. “It was much later that those experiences I had with my father in the forests started coming to me with more meaning.”

At first what really drew her in was her academic work. While doing her master’s at Yale University, she chose to return to India to design her project. What began as a study of the human impact on a wildlife park quickly revealed something else: conflict was visible on the ground, but poorly understood in data.

“There wasn’t much data around,” she explains. Scientific literature offered only localised studies, with no clear sense of scale — how widespread the problem was, which species were involved, or what patterns it followed.

After she completed her PhD from Duke University, Karanth began to focus on answering those questions. Starting around 2009, her work expanded into large-scale research across thousands of villages, documenting where conflict occurs, which animals are involved and how people respond. Over time, that has built into what she describes as nearly two decades of “deep work on studying human–wildlife interactions across India”. Her research has spanned landscapes both inside and outside protected areas, including regions around Bandipur National Park, Nagarhole National Park and Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, as well as adjoining human-dominated areas.

The organisation runs a programme called Wild Seve — a toll-free helpline that helps people file compensation claims for losses caused by wildlife.

“We launched the programme at two wildlife parks 11 years ago. Today we’re in almost 30 wildlife parks.” The programme operates across multiple states, including Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and parts of Maharashtra, covering landscapes around parks such as Bandipur National Park and Nagarhole National Park.

The system helps document losses of crops, livestock, injury or death — and has supported more than 35,000 compensation claims so far. Over time, the programme has reduced delays, with payments that once took more than a year now often processed in under three months.

For Karanth, who is also an Adjunct Professor at Yale University, the significance of the programme goes beyond efficiency. “They know we’re not just coming for the wildlife,” she says. “We’re actually coming to help them.” That, she suggests, reduces the likelihood of retaliatory action against animals.

“Even today, my happiest moments are when I can go and just watch animals,” she says.

Equally important are the conversations that continue to return to the same point — that wildlife has a place, even in difficult circumstances. And there is the work itself: programmes that show some response, communities that continue to engage, people who call because they expect help. “You convert those terrible situations into a neutral to positive view of wildlife,” she says.

For Karanth, the challenge is not one that will disappear. People will continue to live near wildlife, and animals will continue to move through human-dominated landscapes.

The question, then, is not whether conflict can be eliminated, but how it can be managed and who bears its costs. In the villages where her work has taken her for nearly two decades, the answer has remained consistent, even if the circumstances have not.

“The animals have been here as long as we have,” she says, echoing those villagers who constantly surprise and inspire her. “They have a right to live.”