Nature Forever Society Sparrow Award Winners 2012
We at Nature Forever Society are delighted to announce the winners of the Sparrow Awards for 2012. After extensive research and consultation, we selected people from different parts of country who have been working in the field of conservation.
We received numerous nominations and after scrutinizing each nomination as well as other recommendations, the four winners were chosen based on their exemplary conservation efforts.
These Heroes by their sheer determination and gallant efforts have been making a significant contribution to the conservation of nature and biodiversity.
They are working without any formal support or funding from national/international agencies, yet achieving what others with all the resources and skills can only dream of.
Nature Forever Society is honoured to present them with the "Sparrow Awards"
Here's a brief profile of the winners.
Dilsher KhanResident of Satna (Madhya Pradesh)
Age - 43 years
Profession - Welder
Education - MA and wants to Pursue PhD
Background
Dilsher Khan is a welder, manufacturing agricultural tools in Satna (Madhya Pradesh), and has been a lover of birds and nature since childhood.
In 2002, he started monitoring vultures after he learnt about their decline and is also working towards creating awareness with regard to the conservation of vultures.
He travels extensively showing films to villagers on vultures and the dangers of using diclofenac on cattle, which is one of the primary causes of the vulture population declining.
He has received little scientific guidance or funding from any national or international agency. He has been using money from his business to carry out the surveys, and the only support he gets is from his wife who accompanies him and photographs the vultures, the local villagers, volunteers and forest officers.
Nature Forever Society salutes Dilsher Khan for the work he has undertaken for the conservation of vultures. With people like him around, there is still some hope left for vultures.
His dream is to establish a "Vulture Restaurant" where he can provide them with diclofenac free food and conduct long term monitoring of vultures.
Ramita Kondepudi Resident of Bangalore (Karnataka) Age - 15
10th Grade Student
Background
At an age when most students of her age are busy preparing for their 10th grade board exams, Ramita has taken up a mission to make the world waste-free. She started her journey from her own home, community and school.
To create awareness among the students, she organised the First Green Conference for Schools in Bangalore, and installed the first portable biogas plant in her school. She is also the president of her school's Eco Club.
Ramita conceptualized, organized and chaired the First Annual High School Green Conference in Bangalore in September 2011, in which schools from across Bangalore participated to discuss problems and solutions regarding various environmental issues.
The young environmentalist regularly records her personal thoughts, views, experiences, and interesting green news on her blog - http://thinkgreenspeak.blogspot.in/
While environment is her passion, she excels in academics as well. She is consistently the topper in her class, and is balancing a heavy academic load of 9 subjects for IGCSE (Cambridge) this year. She has won a Gold at the All India Robotics Olympiad in 2010, (becoming the first all girls team to ever win the competition), represented India in the 2010 World Robotics Olympiad in Manila, Philippines. She is a Black Belt in Tae Kwon-Do winning State and National level championships, sings Carnatic Music and performs at concerts and is an all-round athlete in tennis, track & field events.
This young lady, albeit only a 10th grade high school student, hopes to encourage more people to lead environment-friendly lives and try to make a difference in their own community.
Residents - Kalwa, Thane (Maharashtra)
Conservation holds good in the country only if it is Tiger-centric or has something to do with the forests. A group of people whose jobs are not even remotely concerned to botany or plant conservation are working to protect one of nature's most important plant species Ficus.
Ficus is known as the keystone species because of the number of species that directly and indirectly depend on then.
The Green Umbrella team, as they call themselves, is led by Yende, who was individually rescuing plants until he was joined by Kapil Jadhav (29), employed in a telecom company, Mahendra Khawnekar and Vishal Rewankar (26), an airline booking executive. All the four are residents of Kalwa in Thane.
The team is involved in rescuing Ficus plants which grow in various places like buildings and other structures.
The group contributes money spent on transportation of the plants to the nursery where they nurture it.
Help comes in from the municipal corporation's garden department which occasionally provides them with soil and manure for the saplings.
At a time when our urban habitats are infested with exotic plant species, the work of this group is ray of hope.
Location - Po-Mangvana, Kutch, Gujarat
In the heart of the desert in the remote village of Mangvana in Kutch, Gujarat, exists an oasis named Shri Mahatma Gandhi Ashramsala, an inconspicuous school with 121 tribal and socially backward community students.
Rajendra M. Desai, Rahul S. Solanki and the students of this school are inspirational in their work. These kids have undertaken massive afforestation works in their school, village and the schools in the surrounding village. Their work has a profound effect as they have shown the way to villagers and communities in matter of tree plantation, water use, cleanliness and care for nature.
The teachers and students have turned the barren landscape into lush green scenery. They set an example of water conservation by using waste water for raising young plants in rocky poor soil types. To raise a tree in such a hostile environment needs determination and nerves of steel.
Coming from economically backward families for the past six years, they have been working consistently in the heart of the desert to turn it into an oasis.
The area is in which these children are working has intense pressure from the charcoal mafia for whom a tree means another bag of charcoal and more money. The air is highly polluted in many villages where the fumes from charcoal linger.
Working against all odds, the students make their efforts look easy as they play and dance to the songs their teachers have composed for them on nature conservation and the value of trees, in the process creating a heaven for biodiversity.
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