Lifetime Service Award for Anne Wright

Mumbai: Anne Wright, a hero to several wildlife conservationists across the country, has been chosen for the Lifetime Service Award 2013 by Sanctuary Asia magazine for her courage and determination to protect India’s tigers.

More than five decades ago, she laid the foundations of India’s wildlife movement even as she served as a field worker, administrator, lobbyist and activist all rolled into one.

The founder trustee of World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) India, which she helped set up in the late 1960s, was appointed by the late prime minister Indira Gandhi as a member of the Tiger Task Force for Project Tiger in 1970. She served for 23 years on the Indian Board for Wildlife and was closely involved with the passing of the Wildlife (Protection) Act. For her service to the cause of wildlife, she was awarded the Order of the Golden Ark and the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Speaking to reporters at a press conference on Thursday, where various Sanctuary awards for commitment to wildlife conservation was announced, Wright said, “It was so easy to talk to Mrs Gandhi. It was extraordinary how we didn’t have to explain since she understood completely.

“The state of wildlife conservation is different now. In the old days, we all worked together openly, collaborating with forest guards to conservator of forests and from secretaries to ministers. Sadly, in present days forest officers are not happy to be interfered [with].”

She also feels that the government system can do very little to curb poaching and encroachment “of the very lands that we fought so hard to conserve.”

Daughter of an Indian Civil Service officer and married to a young merchant of Calcutta, Bob Wright, her daughter Belinda, a keen conservationist, received Sanctuary’s Lifetime Service Award last year.

The passion to take to conservation began when poaching was rampant in the jungles of Bihar during the great drought of 1968 when poachers killed wildlife in the few waterholes that were left.

In an interview to Bittu Sahgal, founder-editor of Sanctuary, she says, “In 1970, I wrote an emotional article for the Statesman describing the shops in the New Market, which is what Hogg Market is now called, where ‘bleached fangs and glimpses of gold and stripes on the shelves’ made my heart sicken.”

The New York Times in 1971 republished the story with the headline “Doom awaits tigers and leopards unless India acts swiftly”. The story raised an outcry, she says, and was perhaps the first documentation of the slaughter of wild tigers and leopards for their skins.

Announcing the award to Wright and also to other conservationists working across India, Sahgal said the awards “celebrate the ordinary Indian, the quiet Indian. The one on whose shoulders this country really runs. In an ocean of dark daily news, these earth heroes who defend natural India as an article of faith, are nation builders, climate warriors, and conscience keepers.”