What lessons did research for Rewilding teach you?

For this book, I spent two years travelling to India’s most remote corners; sometimes alone, and at times, with my four-year-old. I covered places from Manas on the border with Bhutan to Orang Sonitpur district, Assam a lesser-known park but extremely vital habitat for the rhino and pygmy hog. When I finished my travels I came away with an immense sense of pride on how much we are doing to conserve our wildlife, but this hope sits on the precipice of concern. It takes so much hard work to restore an ecosystem or bring back a species and with just one nod from a decision maker, the same forest can be signed away for a dam or a road. Take the Panna example. While we have an army of forest guards on the ground to protect the tiger in this national park in Madhya Pradesh, we now want to drown the same habitat for a river-linking project. Never mind the millions of rupees that have gone in bringing back tigers to a park that lost all its big cats to poaching.

After a decade of covering stories on mining and deforestation, it was time to tell stories of all that we are doing right. I had changed my lens to document all the good stuff and the monumental decisions we are taking to restore species. So we are setting up captive breeding centres for vultures, we have banned the drug that caused the decline of the bird even though countries in Europe have not done the same we are moving big animals like rhinos and tigers like a game of chess to repopulate habitats from where they disappeared. That’s a lot of work and a lot of stories that we don’t hear about often.