Courage under fire
SANCTUARY AWARDS . Sanctuary Magazine . ABN-Amro . India
Sanctuary magazine and ABN-Amro bank have chosen four forest officers and a grassroots activist as Earth Heroes for this year's Sanctuary Wildlife Service Awards for their services to wildlife conservation in the face of opposition.
The winners are: division forest officer of Sanjay Gandhi National Park A R Bharathi, for removing encroachers from forests; range forest officer Sukhdev Singh Notey, for his crackdown on illegal wildlife trade in Maharashtra; Kanha National Park forest officer Rakesh Shukla, for wildlife research and data monitoring; forest officer of Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary Jasbir Singh Chauhan, for executing the Asiatic Lion Replacement Project by relocating 24 villages from forest land; and Samir Acharya, founder of an environmental organisation in the Andamans, who was also active in getting the Supreme Court to ban tree-felling in the islands.
Among other awards, P K Sen, former director of Project Tiger and presently with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), has been chosen for the Sanctuary Lifetime Achievement Award and Hanuman Sharma, a teacher in Rajasthan, has been given the Green Teacher Award for making children aware of water and forest resources.