Charting the Uncharted - Forest, Wildlife and the Quintessential Bengali Girl

Charting the Uncharted - Forest, Wildlife and the Quintessential Bengali Girl

Meghna Bandyopadhyay

Meghna Bandyopadhyay is a Senior Field Officer at the Wildlife Trust of India with a PhD in wildlife science. Originally from Bhilai, Chhattisgarh, her passion for wildlife was nurtured from childhood trips to Central Indian forests. Her extensive research spans large carnivores and mesocarnivores across diverse landscapes, including the Himalayas and Central India. Meghna's work now focuses on mitigating human-wildlife conflict, bridging academic research with on-ground conservation efforts. Meghna has shared her journey and experiences in wildlife conservation with Purogami.

Hailing from a steel city in Bhilai Chhattisgarh, my childhood days were spent venturing into the jungles of the Central Indian landscape. Chhattisgarh has a lot of forest cover to date and hence it allows its residents some amazing opportunities for a quick short unplanned weekend trip. Exploring the unexplored and offbeat places was always my father’s hobby. My mother was equally enthusiastic about touring around and I faintly remember how we three used to squeeze into my father’s Yezdi bike. We used to go biking through the hairpin bends of the Satpura-Maikal range, Amarkantak, Panchmari, and so on. This is how I got introduced to the essence of forest since the age I don’t really remember but surely a few months’ toddler as my mother says. 

Years passed and so the priorities in life started shifting, but one thing was always constant and that was our tours and trips. Although with increasing academic levels the frequency of travel reduced from once a month to once a year. During my 9^th standard in 2006, we shifted from the calm and quiet small city of Bhilai to the hustling and megacity of Kolkata. My initial few years in Kolkata were not good going in the struggle of getting adjusted with the chaos. It was not that difficult for my parents because both of them belonged to North Kolkata. For me, initially, the most difficult part was to read the bus numbers which were primarily written in Bengali as I had to travel a long way from Belur math to Dum Dum Cossipore (Kendriya Vidyalaya) during school days. Till graduation in 2009, my traveling distance increased to Bidhannagar College, Salt Lake but by this time I was used to public transport. Since the time we left Bhilai and landed in Kolkata, we had slowly given up our frequent forest trips. Gradually the urge for the serene forests and the love for its sanctity subsided somewhere deep in my heart with the city of joy and its plethora of other attractions. I finished my Bachelor’s in Chemistry with Honors and found myself more interested in atmospheric science at the end of three years of Bachelors’. So I joined Environmental Science for a Masters’ in Asutosh College in 2012. I liked the structure of the course subjects of our semesters. In our 1^st year, we had basic ecology as one subject followed by a short field trip as an excursion. The ecology classes were primarily mentored by Dr. Arijit Chatterjee and Dr. Udayan Bhattacharya. Both of their styles of teaching were extraordinary and they used to help a lot in design thinking. It was at this moment when my interest started getting aligned with population ecology and I used to enjoy the learning process. The short field trip to Kulik Bird Sanctuary for an excursion was an ice-breaking session for us where we were introduced to studying wildlife and its application. This field of learning was the game changer in my life and I was so thrilled and excited that I decided to take up studying and understanding wildlife for my Master’s dissertation. I want to say aloud that no one could have made this subject more interesting and exciting than these two people; Dr. Arijit Chatterjee (AC) and Mr. Rishin Basu Roy (RB). I was so much into understanding the life around us that I used to do bird watching during the intervals of my Kuchipudi classes at Kuchipudi Art Academy Chennai (I am a regular performer and practitioner of Kuchipudi). By the end of 1^st year, I was determined to study wildlife science. It was Dr. Chatterjee’s and Mr. Rishin Basu Roy’s solemn idea to send me off to the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun, Uttarakhand. I was the only one in our batch to go for wildlife science and probably the farthest one to travel from Kolkata for a dissertation. AC and RB had a hard time pushing me for WII. After a lot of to-and-fro application requests and email exchanges, I finally got an acceptance letter from Prof. Qamar Qureshi’s lab for my dissertation work. In this process, Dr. Parabita Basu and Dr. Abesh Kumar Sanyal played a key role in connecting the email exchanges. On one hand, I was overwhelmed with joy and happiness for being selected but on the other hand, the selection acted like a bombardment at my house. Being a single child at home and that too in a Bengali family it was not easy for me to convince my parents to travel that far for dissertation work. We had a lot of friction while discussing and used to end up with no conclusion, and it went on for several days. After a lot of nagging and cold arguments, I was able to make them understand, and finally, my parents accompanied me to Dehradun. 

I landed in WII on 26^th January 2014, where I met Dr. Y.V. Jhala and Prof. Qamar Qureshi for the first time outside the old guest house. It was like a dream come true for a beginner like me to meet the eminent people whose names need no introduction in the wildlife fraternity. After a few days, my parents waved me off and flew back to Kolkata and my journey to the world of wildlife science started rolling. I joined the All India Tiger Monitoring Program as a volunteer and my mentor for the dissertation program was Dr. K. Sankar, another prominent figure. Soon after my joining formalities, I was sent to Sariska Tiger Reserve, Rajasthan to study the population of leopards and that was my first field site in the WII. The first two months of the field training and acclimatization were very tough. It was no less than a crash course for a naïve person like me. It takes time to orient yourself from a city college life to a remote work area. I soon realized that studying wildlife is not as easy as it seems. It’s not just a subject that one can read and fetch marks. It’s a holistic learning process where one learns about teamwork, analyzing each other’s strengths, respect for people, management, communication to all hierarchy of personnel, reading, sampling design, conducting fieldwork, brainstorming with colleagues and mentors, writing, publishing papers, cooking, basecamp maintenance, vehicle monitoring, socializing with local people, and many more. I had conducted camera trapping sessions for three months covering 120 grids of 2x2 sq. km. and sign surveys for tiger and leopard population estimation and this was beyond my imagination when I started the fieldwork. It was difficult to complete within a stipulated time. The mammoth task wouldn’t have been completed without the humongous support of the field assistants I had (Mamraj ji, Rajesh, and Ratan). The bonding with them is still so fresh and they still have a special place in my life. I wrapped up from Sariska and returned to WII in April, finished writing, and analyzed data for the dissertation in one month, and returned to Kolkata in June. Although I hardly slept for more than 5 hours during my entire 6-months tenure, I thoroughly enjoyed the learning process and had no regret in fighting with my parents for this. In July 2014 I successfully defended my dissertation work as a part of our 2^nd year module and received quite an appreciation from faculty and friends. I ended up scoring the highest marks in the Masters course and by this time I could gain the full confidence of my parents in choosing the right subject. 

The urge to understand wildlife science has increased many folds now and my parents knew that I would not stop here and would continue doing research. I rejoined the WII in September 2014, this time as a Research Biologist. The feeling of being a full-time researcher in WII is beyond explanation. Now I was working under Dr. Jhala and Prof Qamar Qureshi and was posted in Kanha Tiger Reserve, Madhya Pradesh as a part of the All India tiger monitoring project. Once again I was back in Central India and I could relate to the lost feeling of the forest and its essence. The Kanha meadows were still as beautiful as they used to be during my childhood trips with my parents more than 10 years ago. 2015 rolled on very fast studying the predator and its prey of Kanha Tiger Reserve and Phen Wildlife Sanctuary. In all these two years, I was studying the large carnivores primarily the big cats. 

It was in 2016 when I realized my area of interest lies in studying mesocarnivores rather than large carnivores and that I want to pursue a PhD. Also, I wanted to explore the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR), and my research interest was aligned with the lesser-known, elusive, small-ranging carnivores in the Himalayas. It is always advisable to give some time in between your Master's and PhD especially when it is not your mother subject, to prepare yourself and gain confidence in your research topic. Because it is a commitment of another four to five years and it does take patience to another level. Once I was confident enough, I resigned from the Tiger Project and applied for the National Mission on Himalayan Studies Fellowship award granted by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) in WII. Fortunately, my proposal got accepted and I could bag the fellowship program award and secure my funding for PhD for three years. I joined Dr. K. Ramesh’s (KR) lab for my PhD, he is one of the known faces for tiger reintroductions in India. I got myself registered with Forest Research Institute (FRI) as a Junior Research Fellow and finished the six months of coursework. By 2017 I was all set to kick off my PhD journey. 

I was indeed lucky enough to choose the Great Himalayan National Park (GHNP) in Himachal Pradesh as my field site for the next three years. This was another dream come true because this is one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world but equally challenging. There was no vehicular road to or inside the park, so you had been on your foot even to reach the entry gate of GHNP. It is a part of the greater Himalayan landscape and holds a wide variety of flora and fauna. Owing to its rich biodiversity, this has been named as ‘Great’ Himalayan National Park. It gained its status as a World Heritage site in 2014. One of its four valleys (Parvati, Sainj, Jeewanala, and Tirthan), Tirthan has now become one of the top ten tourist attraction places. But going back to 2017, it was not touristy at all. My first footfall in GHNP happened in February 2017. The initial three to four months were a bit struggle for setting up the base camp and doing pilot surveys in the harsh and rugged terrain. Also, the locals’ acceptance of a single-woman researcher was quite low and was quite demoralizing sometimes. So overall it was not a good start for me with all the logistical hindrance and struggle for acceptance by people but where there is will, there is always a way. Apart from all the hard work I have put in all these years of fieldwork, I have learned the most three important words in my life which are; persistence, patience, and motivation. Without these, one cannot survive working in remote landscapes for sure. Especially for women, people will accept you only if you are strong enough like them to survive in the mountains. This is where I gained their interest as I could walk enormously irrespective of terrain and duration. Owing to my exhaustive classical dance training since childhood, my stamina was good enough as compared to my other field teammates so I could walk tirelessly for long hours that too with a a 20 kg to 25 kg backpack. By 2018, life was a little easy and my struggle for acceptance had ended and I started building a good bond with my field assistants. The topic of my thesis was to understand the response of mesocarnivores along the elevation gradient in GHNP and my focal species were red fox, leopard cat, and yellow-throated marten. I also looked at their interaction in three dimensions, i.e. space, time, and diet. In May 2018, I got an opportunity to visit the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver as an exchange student for 4 months as a part of the Queen Elizabeth scholarship program. I worked under the supervision of Dr. Cole Burton, one of the lead ecologists in quantitative ecology. My analytical skills and ecological understanding were much better by the time I resumed my fieldwork in November 2018. In two and a half years, my field team (Pritam ji and Bintu, locals from Kharogcha and Tindhar) deployed 330 camera traps, collected 768 carnivore scat samples, and walked more than 700 km in the landscape. During the field sessions we used to trek and camp inside the park for 7 to 8 days and then return to basecamp (mungla). The time spent inside the park is the best memory of my life. GHNP is famous for Himalayan brown bears, leopards, and snow leopards. So even if you go for a loo, you have to be hundred percent alert of the surroundings. Every day was filled with thrill and excitement. I got my wrist fractured after rolling over a hillslope, got lost inside the forest and hardly saved our lives from frostbite, got charged by a brown bear. The fear of sleeping alone inside a tent and being sniffed by anonymous species from outside the tent wall at night, the ultimate joy of photo capturing snow leopard for the first time in GHNP, the mysterious ghost stories of the abandoned huts inside the park and many more memorable incidents are still fresh in my mind. With all the adrenaline rush, we finally concluded the field in GHNP in July 2019 and it was like leaving your own home while wrapping up and leaving our base camp. It was strange to see people mourning for you who once ignored you. 

After returning to headquarters at WII in 2019, the lab work, analyzing, writing, and publishing papers phase began. I had 768 carnivore scat samples to process for species identification using molecular markers and diet analysis. Quite a good amount of labor jobs for the remaining two years of my PhD tenure, which was fine. But, soon after we all faced two years of absolute stagnation due to the Covid lockdown. This made 2020 very frustrating sitting at home and doing nothing when you had tons of lab work to finish. In 2021, I could barely start the lab work and all the pressure was now piled up into one year. Somehow I could finish the bad lab days with the support of my husband (Dr. Suvankar Biswas; we got married in 2019) and finally defended my thesis on 26^th December 2022. This journey would not have been possible without the unparalleled support of my supervisor KR and my energy booster my mother, father, and my husband. Afterward, I continued working at WII as a research consultant for another six months and resigned and wrapped up from WII in July 2023. A chapter of nine long years in WII had come to an end. 

In the due course, I had lost track of my dancing sessions and I wanted to resume it after my PhD. So I joined the one-year Diploma Kuchipudi course at REVA University in Bangalore and started brushing myself. This helped me gain confidence in performing again on stage and in a few months I got called to perform in the most prestigious Konark dance and music festival with Guru Jayramarao’s team on 3^rd November 2023. This was followed by another couple of prominent festivals in India after which I was confident enough about my regained dancing skills and was now ready to resume research. 

After finishing PhD, my interest was more towards wildlife interaction with humans and I always intended to continue studying the emerging conservation issues in India. Because India is a populated country, human-wildlife conflict is going to be an irreversible issue like climate change in the Indian context. Understanding coexistence is what people need to imbibe and amend. I am currently working with Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), joining on March, 21^st 2024. This is a completely new chapter for me. As of now, we were mostly oriented to the academic part of the research. However, joining WTI gave an exposure to the on-ground conservation part of the research. This is like bridging the gap between academics and conservation. I am working as a Senior Field Officer on the very interesting facts of human-wildlife conflict that includes elephants, tigers, and leopards. The cases include attacks on humans by wildlife, cattle lifting by wildlife, and retaliatory killing of wildlife by humans. It is a multi-faceted issue that needs thorough attention and study. This involves matters of involvement and working in sync with the forest department. But the most interesting part is that I am again placed in the Central Indian Landscape in Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve which brings me back to my place of origin. 

On the way ahead I wish to collaborate with the institutions or organizations working abroad on similar conservation issues so that we can bring in more ideas and develop better management practices for the intense human-wildlife conflict scenarios.  

Till now my journey in wildlife has been very exciting with studying species from big cats to meso carnivores to megaherbivore, semi-arid arid regions to greater Himalaya and Central Himalaya and cultural changes from different cities, and meeting different wavelengths of people. The shift in my career from an honors degree holder in Chemistry to an active ecologist and conservationist is still shocking to me sometimes. I have always taken up whatever comes to my way and I will always be in debt to my parents (Mr. Jayanta Bandyopadhyay & Mrs. Debarati Bandyopadhyay) for having faith in me and questioning my abilities from time to time and supporting my requirements.  

  Meghna Bandyopadhyay, PhD