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ಭೂಮಿ

We Don't Save

Nature. We Become It.


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I — What We Feel 

Conservation was stolen from the people who built it.



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Knowledge became institutional property.

 

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Voice of the western Ghats 

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Non Zero Educational Space

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Circula 

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Project Kenjiga

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Reclaiming coexistence.

Across India's forest edges, the daily encounters between people and wildlife  elephants, leopards, sloth bears, wild boars  are intensifying. Kerala alone has recorded 1,527 wildlife-encounter fatalities in just fifteen years. Across the country, fatal encounters have risen 36% in just four years.

The wildlife is paying too. Hundreds of elephants, leopards, and other species are lost each year to electrocution, poisoning, and retaliation born of fear and exhaustion.

The households absorbing these losses are the poorest in the country, living in its richest landscapes, compensated at 1/80th the value of a human life. Nothing is offered for the animal.

Three hundred million Indians share geography with India's wildlife  across the Western Ghats, Central India, the Northeast, the Himalayan foothills.


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~650/yr lost to large wildlife encounters across India · rising 
Wild lives~900/yrelephants, tigers, leopards etc  lost to retaliation, electrocution, infrastructure 

300M Indians sharing

forest geography

 

36% Rise in fatal encounters

2020 → 2024

 
India ranked 4th globally for climate-induced migration in 2020–21 with over 3 million displaced; the 45M projection is the 2050 trajectory if nothing changes. 
100%Forest under climate stress by 2050, the entire Indian forest cover is projected to fall within climate change hotspots 

Place-based

Coexistence is local, or it is nothing.

The elephant in this valley is not the elephant in the next. The forest here speaks a different grammar than the forest two ridges over. We work landscape by landscape, gram panchayat by gram panchayat  because real coexistence is built in specific places, with specific people, around specific lives.







The result is not a programme. It is an ecosystem of dialogue spaces, learning places, and living archives 

 


Community-led

The community sets the agenda.

We do not arrive with a programme to deliver. We sit, we listen, and we ask what the community wants to build. Farmers, elders, women's collectives, youth groups, panchayats — they hold the knowledge and they hold the decisions. We hold space, time, and tools.


 















Community-owned

Knowledge stays where it was born.

Every recording, every archive, every learning resource we co-create is held by the community itself,  not extracted into an institutional database. We build the infrastructure (recording, translating, storing, teaching) so that the next generation can inherit it without having to ask anyone's permission.

None can be protected from. All must be partnered with.

The way we see ourselves is the way we see forests. 

Dialogue for Coexistence
Co-creating spaces for inclusive dialogue with communities living within shared forest landscapes.

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Voice of the Western Ghats

A flagship programme advancing coexistence, conservation, and community resilience across the Western Ghats.

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"ನಾಡ ಮಕ್ಕಳಾ ನಾವು, ಕಾಡು ಮಕ್ಕಳು ನಾವು."

Vijay Kumar
COO of BCEF
 A Project of Voice of the Western Ghats

 FOREST FESTIVAL

A process of understanding forest ecology alongside inner ecology.

 

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What if conservation, restoration, and ecological knowledge

were people's projects — not institutional programmes?

 

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